


Some Shine and Some Keep You Guessing

by innie



Category: Kingsman (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-18
Updated: 2019-10-18
Packaged: 2020-11-09 11:17:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 35,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20852558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/innie/pseuds/innie
Summary: There are those who are lucky in love, and there are those who pick up the pieces.





	Some Shine and Some Keep You Guessing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [girl_wonder](https://archiveofourown.org/users/girl_wonder/gifts).

> AU that picks up just where the first movie ends — completely disregards the second movie.
> 
> Alternating Harry and Merlin PoVs.
> 
> I really liked the idea I had when writing an earlier fic that the Kingsman support staff would have code names out of Shakespeare, so that's happening again here.
> 
> I lifted the phrase "tenacious of life" directly from _Jane Eyre_ because I love it so much.
> 
> Title from Van Halen's "When It's Love."

Merlin's face is pale even for him, the lines in it looking like they'd been painfully carved, but he still summons a smile when Harry blinks up at him. Harry's heart lurches in his chest, remembering that Merlin had been the one monitoring his feed in the church, that Merlin must have seen him being shot in the face and left for dead. Harry is going to rip Richmond Valentine limb from stringy limb for that.

He won't need the full weight of Kingsman behind him. All he needs is Merlin — all he's ever needed, for as long as he's been a knight, is Merlin's voice in his ear and the comforting knowledge that it is Merlin's brain planning out how he can best attack and survive — and Valentine will die without seeing the new world he wanted come to fruition.

And after, after they set the world in order once more, surely Merlin will give in and acknowledge that they've earned countless hours together in bed? Will let him lavish every sort of pleasure on that long and lean body?

Harry's thoughts stutter to a stop when Merlin's hand cups his cheek, a careful thumb smoothing along his cheekbone. "Only you, Harry. Only you could get shot in the face and still be beautiful."

He can feel a smile rearranging his features and shifting Merlin's cool palm. "Adamantine," he jokes, waving a hand near his face with a flourish, as if his head were not starting to pound. It cannot be just his imagination that Merlin's gaze seems to drift down to his cock, as if to intimate that that is the only part of Harry that is reliably hard. Harry feels his breath catch in his throat.

"You caught me out, damn you," Merlin says, taking back his hand to tap at his tablet. His soft voice and the smudginess of his accent are gentle enough that Harry's headache doesn't escalate, whatever damage his disappointment at the lost moment wreaks. "There's a conformer in your eye socket maintaining the shape we need to insert the ocular prosthesis — no, don't touch the pressure patch — but the only prosthesis that's currently available will be sightless."

Ah," Harry says, wind quite taken out of his sails. How many prolonged stays has he had in this infirmary, only to walk out on his own two feet and in top form? Why can't this time be as simple?

"Every other agent we've had with eye injuries this severe has chosen to retire; there hasn't been a need to develop visual prostheses that are sight-capable, if it can even be done." Merlin is frowning slightly down at his tablet, but snaps his gaze back to Harry. "The choice is always yours, Harry."

"Merlin," he says before he can help it, and Merlin, having turned away, pivots back. Harry's mouth has got him into terrible scrapes and then seen him safely through them, so he lets it run on, damn the consequences. He'll be the one-eyed phoenix of Valentine's worst nightmares and then the fully-sighted man of Merlin's dreams. "You'd better get to work."

Merlin's grin is broad and bright, relief lighting up his face, his entire being. "As you say, Galahad."

* * *

Outside Harry's door (the one that might as well have had _Galahad_ engraved on it, for the number of times he's troubled Medical), Merlin grips his tablet all the more tightly even as he feels himself start to achieve some semblance of calm. There have been about a dozen false starts to begin with, but this is the fourth consecutive time Harry has known him upon waking (though he's consistently failed to recognise anybody else), and the first that Harry appeared to understand and remember what had happened to him whilst Merlin sat idly by and watched his friend get shot down and left to die under a baking sun.

He will never get over that, not for as long as he lives.

Harry is indispensable to him, a friend he made long ago, back when he was but a lonely child treated variously as a prodigy or a poor relation by the members of this fantastical organisation known as Kingsman. Harry, with all the glamour of a knighthood clinging to him like expensive cologne, had been the first to smile at _him_, to see the orphan boy once known as Jasper Gordon hunched behind the imposing wall of monitors belonging to the new position of Merlin. He had needed that then, and he's never since broken the habit of needing Harry Hart.

He knows Harry (the very good _and_ the very bad) better than anyone and still he's surprised at the bravery Harry just showed; perhaps Eggsy's exalted view of Harry is closer to the truth than his own, diminished by more than thirty years of familiarity.

From the first, Eggsy had adored Harry, idolised him. No-one but Harry Hart would have raised an eyebrow and expected the perfect candidate to fall immediately into line (and for no-one but Harry Hart would that trick even have worked). Eggsy had walked into the most dangerous job interview in the world without a word of warning, and his faith in Harry had allowed him to flourish. Merlin can still hear, without having to strain his memory, the exact tone Eggsy's voice took on as he composed a litany of Harry's many wonders for Roxy's benefit (after his habit of studying at a comatose Harry's bedside made it patently obvious just who'd proposed him). "Shoulda seen him, Rox, just one endless line of him, every bit of him in motion, not a movement wasted. Fuck, I'd never seen anything like him, not even in special effects. Perfect, just perfect." Once, and only once, had Roxy squawked any kind of protest at having to hear these paeans so often, and Merlin had adjusted the view on his own glasses to be able to take in Eggsy's shameless grin and response of, "What, can't tell the prettiest girl I know about the prettiest man I've ever seen?"

Merlin tells himself that what _he_ has earned is just as good as being the man who caught Eggsy's eye, that it means something that when Eggsy uncovered and exposed the rot at the heart of Kingsman, he'd turned to Merlin because he knew Merlin at least would never have thrown in with Chester Fucking King. It is not just empty consolation; it matters intensely that Eggsy trusts him that far. It was, after all, the moment he realised he loves Eggsy.

But it was Harry that Eggsy had his heart set on, so Merlin had spoken in his dead friend's name to boost the lad and give him the courage to find himself and take down Valentine with the world on the line. Eggsy was a champion coming into his own that day, pivoting from brute strength to nimbleness, from strategy to compassion. He'd been the one to coax Royal Crown Princess Tilde into leading by example, helping him to sort out all the other prisoners while Merlin read out access codes for the occupied cells and did his best to prepare as many of the jets as possible.

Their own jet was full of South American celebrities and dignitaries and notables when Roxy climbed aboard and flew into Eggsy's arms. Eggsy kissed her face over and over again, uncaring that his tear tracks were making her cheeks wet, and they simply clung to each other in a way that Merlin, close to their entwined forms in the crowded cockpit, completely understood even as he envied them. 

At long last they separated and Merlin looked up to see Eggsy's exhausted gaze land on him, but the lad simply excused himself and headed to the back of the plane to call his mum. Roxy sank into the co-pilot's seat and they reached Brazilian airspace soon enough. A faint crescendoing beeping, emerging from the cacophony of all the fragmented messages competing for airwaves and attention, at last became comprehensible, and Merlin felt the shock of it like a blow across his shoulders. It was the Morse dots and dashes spelling out _HRH_ that he'd programmed into Harry's signet ring himself (too many of those damned Arthurian names began with the same letters for code names to be a better option than a knight's initials), the pulse both indicating that Harry was somehow alive and reporting his location. 

"Merlin?" Roxy asked, his stillness pushing her back to alertness; he almost wished he hadn't trained her quite so well.

"It's Harry — Galahad, rather," he said, seeing the moment she understood the significance of those beeps. "He was on a mission in the States."

"But he died, Eggsy saw him get — Eggsy! He's going to go out of his mind at this news! What do you know?"

He gestured helplessly. "Just that he somehow survived being shot in the face." Merlin could feel Roxy's assessing gaze on him, but he had enough to be getting on with. His heart cried out for Eggsy while his mind knew enough to be thankful the lad hadn't had the announcement sprung on him like he had.

"And you also know," Roxy said, scowling a little in a way not even the HALO suit had made her frown, "that once he recovers he's going to use his apparent immortality to keep Eggsy dangling after him like a lovesick fool. The number of times he looked right _through_ him, when all Eggsy wanted was a hello. Merlin, _please_ don't let him."

Merlin was bitterly amused that she was relying on him to keep Eggsy out of Harry's arms, but of course she, like the other knights, saw him as sexless Merlin, an automaton of no particular age or desire, not as a man capable of love and lust and all the rest. He wondered what she'd say if he told her he could have had Harry Hart in his bed at any time these past thirty years if he'd just reached out his hand to that oversexed peacock. But she was only looking out for her best friend, who'd earned her loyalty. As he needed to do for his.

"Harry won't be in any shape to do any seducing, lass," was all he said, not spilling any secrets, and then the silence between them grew until Eggsy made his way back to the cockpit, flushed with relief that his mum and sister had got through those terrible minutes without a scratch.

Merlin kept his attention resolutely focused on the terrain below, brought the jet down on Brazilian soil, and relayed (in Portuguese, Spanish, and English) that they had reached their destination. He tried not to think about the way Eggsy would shine when he learned that Harry lived, the man apparently as hard to kill as the medieval legend he was named for.

* * *

He's never had an internal clock that functioned with any accuracy, and in any case he's supposed to be resting his eye and mind while the swelling goes down — enucleation surgery is hardly pretty — so he has no resources at all to determine how much time has passed since Merlin left. 

His sex drive, always high, has returned with a vengeance. He's indulging himself by reminiscing not about the honeypots on which he had Merlin in his ear or his couplings with other Kingsmen, but on the encounters he had after he left Galahad behind at the close of another successful mission. Always men for preference — he left the skirt-chasing to his father — and always . . . _talented_; he's frankly been glad to learn from some of them. He wants to do everything he's ever had done to him to Merlin, watch him throw his head back in voiceless pleasure, close those eyes because one more iota of sensory input would be too much. It is an irresistible picture to him, and he cannot fathom why Merlin has not allowed him to make it a reality. No other Kingsman he's approached has declined.

And Eggsy . . . Eggsy, had he only had the backbone to succeed, would have been the third Lancelot to grace his bed and by far the most beautiful. Harry knows well enough when he's desired, and Eggsy's surrender would have been delicious, judging by the sweetness of his overt adoration; the boy had been so close to simply handing himself over during their twenty-four hours together after the train test, but Harry only takes blooded knights to his own bed. Perhaps it's time to bend that rule a bit — if he can find the boy again in the morass of South London, he'll get round Arthur somehow, and bring him back to Kingsman in a support role, transport specialist or something else along those lines. Merlin surely won't mind helping his old friend out or aiding the candidate he'd seemed to favour.

"Hello, Galahad," a cool voice says and Harry's eye flies open. It's a young woman, and, wishing he had better armour than his dratted dressing-gown, he fumbles for her name. _Percival's_ is all his wretched brain can come up with for a moment. Percival's _what_? Percival's daughter? Niece? Candidate, certainly, that much comes back readily to him. It's boorish that he knows the lines of her naked body — he had proposer's privilege of reviewing all video files of the candidates, and the cameras recorded around the clock — and yet cannot summon her name. Though if she is sitting here in the infirmary, without any identification pinned to her clothing, she has to be a Kingsman herself; it had been down to her and Eggsy, and she was the one who'd earned it.

He pushes all thoughts of Eggsy to the back of his mind for the moment and greets her by the name she fought so hard for. "Hello, Lancelot." He clears his throat and waits.

Her brisk nod tells him nothing. Her empty hands are equally baffling, though she is wearing Kingsman spectacles, so potentially Merlin is on the other side of them, watching all of this. Or, awfully, it could be Arthur, sipping his terrible brandy and congratulating himself on never having been an active agent if these were the sorts of messes that knights could be dropped into. "May I ask what brings you to my temporary accommodations?" Harry finally asks, plastering a polite smile on his face to match hers. Whether she is so collected because she doesn't know him well enough to care about the ruin his face must be or because she knows Merlin will expect no less from his knights is a question he cannot settle. He wants desperately to look in a mirror to assess the damage; Merlin was surely too kind in his reassurance.

"I thought you might want some company, medical personnel aside." Her tone is professional but there's still no warmth to her face or her voice, beautiful though they are. It's been years since he gave any woman more than a passing glance of his own volition — honeypots are another matter entirely — and he does wonder what she might look like animated by a little emotion. "I believe the other knights are out of the country."

"Merlin has visited, but I thank you. What a charming welcome wagon you are to be sure," he says, to see if that will startle a smile out of her.

She looks at him for a long moment and finally one corner of her mouth turns up. "It's Roxanne," she says, utterly confident that he didn't remember. She's right, though the moment she divulges her name, he hears Eggsy's happy cries of _Rox!_ "Roxanne Morton."

"Roxanne Elise Morton, Lancelot, eleventh of that honoured name." It's all coming back to him now, as if Eggsy's remembered voice were a key to the door behind which his memories were stockpiled. "So you are Merlin's proxy?" How he wishes he could just have Merlin himself.

Her eyes flash behind her spectacles, and she unlocks her fingers to push the glasses to the top of her head, where all they can film is the anonymous ceiling. "Not at all. He's wrapped up in Percival's mission just now, and I know they would both welcome a report that you are doing well once they're done."

"Really." Percival has never been a close friend — or a bedmate — though if he visited with Merlin, Harry would make him welcome at any time. "And _am_ I doing well, by your lights?"

"I didn't know you before, except by reputation and the occasional glance in HQ corridors when you passed by us," she points out unnecessarily. "So I can't assess whether the defence mechanisms you've needlessly engaged just for this conversation — in a safe space with someone you know offers no threat — are as robust as they once were." 

He startles and then laughs at her clinical coolness. "I wasn't even aware," he says, not entirely truthful; the point of instinct is that it happens subconsciously, but he knows his instincts are extraordinarily good. There is something _roiling_ inside her, something that demands a closer look.

Her answering smile is there and gone. "And I also have no baseline to determine whether your reliance on Merlin was always quite so evident."

He keeps his face scrupulously blank. "He's been the voice in my ear for thirty years. Upon whom else should I rely?" He's dimly aware he must sound like the privileged toff Eggsy feared he would be and ended up thinking he was, but from everything he can see, Roxanne is of his own social sphere and will expect nothing less.

He's not quite wrong-footed her, but there is a pause that he slithers into. "Ah, I see," he says, though it's not true; he's lashing out rather than listening to his instincts, and letting his tone insinuate all sorts of things only because she dared to mention Merlin as if she _knows_ him. It's still enough to make her pull herself together and drop her glasses over her probing eyes. "What will your report say?"

"You're doing quite well, I believe. The Table will be glad to hear it. Good day, Galahad," she says, and she's off.

* * *

Eggsy is at his door and Merlin stands, looking away from his monitors for the first time in what feels like ages. This mission has been extraordinarily demanding in terms of logistics, none of which could have been worked out beforehand, but Eggsy — no, call him by his proper name, Percival — is the ideal knight for such a mission, as he can improvise without feeling lost and still keep his eye on the prize.

"Come in, lad," he says, rolling his neck and shoulders. Eggsy smiles up at him, small but bright, and flexes his fingers, which must have grown cramped around his pistols.

"Hiya, guv," Eggsy says, as Merlin's been waiting for; that's been his standard conversation opener after debriefing Arthur on whatever mission he's just completed. Merlin's pleased that the lad's started his time as a knight with such an exemplary Arthur; the former Percival, eighth of his name, was the one to make Eggsy a knight, with Roxy seconding the motion, as Merlin (being mere support staff) had no say in the matter.

"Looking good, Eggsy," Merlin says in return, doing his part. And the lad does, weary but still lovely as candlelight. There's a smile on that face, no doubt because he can see his sister soon, and Merlin hates to be the one to wipe it away, but Harry woke up for good while Eggsy was on the plane to St. Petersburg and already in his mission mindset.

"Feeling good, Merlin." Eggsy nods and then steps forward, just a bit closer.

"One moment. I have news." Merlin treats (or tortures) himself with one last look at the lad he's dreamt of being his, then says, "Harry is awake. He says he wants to remain our Galahad, and he should be out of Medical in a matter of weeks."

"He's alright, then?" Eggsy asks, face gone appealingly solemn. "No unexpected problems?"

Aside from the fact that he'll have a blind side until Merlin gets his arse in gear and figures out how to create a viable prosthesis capable of sight, Harry is remarkably well. "Headaches, and other temporary pains, plus he lost the eye, but yes, your mentor seems to be tenacious of life." He cannot help himself from saying, "And thank god for that."

Eggsy barrels forward at that, wrapping him up in a fierce hug. "You ain't gotta be strong around me, he's your best friend. Can't think what I'd be like if it were Rox in that hospital bed."

Eggsy's been running hard and long enough to break a sweat, and he smells like it even after his flight home, but Merlin wouldn't trade having the lad in his arms for anybody else fresh from a shower. Eggsy is warm and so tender with him, and Merlin's treacherous heart picks up its pace though the hug itself is improbably soothing. The lad is Harry's, he has to remember that; Eggsy is Harry's by his own choice, and perhaps Harry will, with his renewed life, realise what a miracle he's got and devote himself entirely to his former candidate and stop fucking any and every man who catches his eye.

He doesn't realise he's been squeezing Eggsy far too tightly for the lad to breathe or make a sound until the silence hammers at him. He lets go abruptly, mortified, but Eggsy stays near, close enough that the lad's panting breaths are spots of warmth on his neck. "Apologies. I shouldn't have —"

"Fuck that," Eggsy interrupts him, arching back and gazing unblinkingly at him. "You can ask me for anything, anytime." Merlin cannot decipher what the lad means by that and stares stupidly down at his beloved. Eggsy's arms are still looped around his waist (surely an oversight?) but the light is going out of his face. 

"Or maybe I'll have to do the asking," Eggsy mutters to himself, and Merlin flounders, trying to figure out what the lad is playing at, why he's still here instead of sprinting to Harry's bedside. Eggsy buries his face in the middle of Merlin's chest and sighs, then tips his head back. Merlin's shocked to see that his eyes are glossy and his eyelashes clumped in wet spikes. "Please, Merlin?" The arms tighten around his waist, fingers slowly climbing his spine.

It feels like he might just float away (why not, when his dreams are so wondrous?), only getting Eggsy's face between his palms brings him rapidly down to earth, the softness of the lad's skin making him abruptly aware that this is reality. Eggsy's mismatched eyebrows go up, hopeful, and Merlin, still disbelieving but obeying Eggsy's seemingly involuntary nods, dips his head to claim his sweet mouth.

Eggsy goes boneless in his arms and Merlin, fully immersed in this madness, lifts him up and kisses him until their mouths are sore, until Eggsy's eyes are avid rather than shy, and then beyond. There is nothing else for him but to love this lad.

* * *

Rest be damned, he wants footage of that jumped-up _child_ calling herself Lancelot and he wants it now. He rings the call button and one of the doctors shows up with a clipboard that can't quite rival Merlin's in her hands. He cannot remember which Royal Park is her title, Kensington or Hyde, which already puts him at a disadvantage when he intends to browbeat her for a tablet that holds candidate footage, the better to divine Roxanne's weaknesses. But she meets his gaze unflinchingly and steadies him when sitting upright makes him dizzy and then has a tablet delivered. 

The only files loaded on it are the most recent Lancelot trials, a testament to Merlin's prescience and precisely organised mind. Though it takes him long minutes to get used to viewing the footage with only one eye, he manages in time to see Chester's detestable candidate — wet sleep-trousers indicating that he had reason enough in his pants to walk around with that swagger — putting Eggsy down with a remark about two-way mirrors and Roxanne's reactions to the situation. She flinches along with Eggsy when Merlin, lying through his teeth, tells them their failure led to Amelia's death, and stands stupidly open-mouthed at the sight of the corpse while Eggsy looks aghast. Soon enough, however, she's the first of the candidates to pick out new pyjamas and a bunk in the dry dormitory, and she's eyeing Merlin speculatively in a way that makes Harry growl at the screen. Merlin is commanding and kind and _not for her_.

Roxanne can issue all of the oblique warnings she likes; Harry is territorial as fuck, as Eggsy would say, and he staked his claim on the genius of Kingsman before Roxanne was even born.

He presses pause again, and the action begins once more. Eggsy has drops of water hanging from his earlobes like jewels, and Merlin throws him a towel that makes him shiver with delight at its plush thickness. Roxanne is still watching Merlin and Merlin is tracking Eggsy more closely than the other candidates when he bids them all goodnight and turns out the lights as he leaves. Harry is too aroused by Merlin's authoritative presence to be patient, so he skips forward to the train test. 

Merlin ties all of the competitors to the tracks himself for the sake of fairness, and Harry sees that he ties Chester's big-pricked pillock of a candidate no more securely than he had Eggsy, that he rearranges Roxanne's lacy skirt so that it preserves her modesty a bit more surely. And Merlin breathes not a partisan word, but Harry sees — both in the footage and in his own memory of the event — in the tension of his shoulders how much he wants to welcome Eggsy into the monitoring room and give him a kind word about his father. He is angrily disappointed all over again; with Merlin's goodwill to light his way, there really is no excuse for Eggsy to have failed his last test so spectacularly.

*

Being fitted with the prosthetic is less fiddly than Harry expected; Dr. Hyde tells him that Merlin mapped his socket with a computer program, rendering any sort of messy impressions and clumsy or painful adjustments thankfully unnecessary, and so he has a near-permanent addition to his face. He blinks, finding the action of shutting and opening his lids equally smooth in both eyes. Dr. Hyde's smile is the brightest thing in the room until Merlin comes in, beaming.

"I'm ready," he tells Merlin, aware that he's jumping the gun but too relieved by this success to temper his anticipation. "How would you like Valentine to die?" Hearing reasoned bloodthirstiness in Merlin's soft burr has always been one of Harry's favourite perks of the job.

Merlin clears his throat and Dr. Hyde takes her leave. "Harry," Merlin says, "Valentine's been taken care of, eliminated."

_No_. Valentine was _his_ mission. "Percival killed Gazelle and then speared Valentine through the heart with one of her prostheses. I assure you that Valentine felt the full measure of pain."

"When?" is all he can ask, because the incredulous cry of _Percival?_ will not emerge from his throat.

"The same day you fell, just hours before we got word that you were actually alive."

Harry does not have a good sense of time, and the antibiotics and steroids he's had forced on him after his surgeries have made the days blend together in one hazy episode, so he is forced to ask. "And how long ago was that?"

"Two months," Merlin admits.

"Fucking hell, Merlin! What else has changed since I've been twiddling my thumbs?"

"You needed every second of those two months to make today the success it has been," Merlin says, admonishment and affection mingling easily in his tone, and Harry feels his body start to thrum with waves of arousal. He stands, trying to rid himself of excess energy, and fights his way through the disorientation of being on his own two feet after so long staying recumbent. "And we need you fighting fit."

"You have me," he promises, offering up his hand, thrilling when Merlin clasps it in the coolness of his own and brings the other to his elbow, making sure Harry is steady on his feet. "We'll set the world to rights."

"I know." Merlin lets go long enough to send a message to Arthur, and Harry, knowing Chester will drag his feet rather than appear to be at Merlin's beck and call, spends the time pacing up and down and gaining strength while concentrating on managing his equilibrium. He's startled when the door swings open after only a brief delay to reveal Percival, resplendent in a grey suit, ivory shirt, and royal-purple paisley tie. "Arthur," Merlin says, nodding respectfully.

Wait, if Percival is Arthur, what happened to that pompous toad, Chester King? Is John the Percival who killed Valentine, or was it the unknown someone who assumed that title upon John's accession to the throne? Harry feels adrift, almost dizzy with it, but straightens his spine and holds out his hand to his new king. "Arthur," he greets him.

"Galahad," John acknowledges with a handshake and gestures to the small round table, set with four chairs, positioned on the other side of the room. They all sit, and on Merlin's screen Harry can see a video of Lancelot on the firing range, evidently trying to improve her weapons scores. Merlin minimises that window to pull up a colour-coded map.

"Lancelot and Percival have been taking the lion's share of the short-term missions cleaning up after Valentine," Arthur says, gesturing at the tablet, "and the more seasoned agents — those few remaining — have been trying to assure appropriate distributions of power through our usual methods. Valentine set his final push in motion hours after your supposed death. Within Kingsman, he was aided by my predecessor." Harry cannot suppress the fury that rises in him when he thinks of Chester King's blithely sending him to certain death and using an unwitting Merlin as his tool. "Eggsy," John continues, and Harry looks to Merlin, confused by the mention of a name he hadn't thought to hear from a Kingsman knight, "was watching your feed on your home terminal and returned to HQ to offer his help though he'd failed out. It was he who realised that Chester was a traitor and killed him and brought the evidence to Merlin."

If just hearing the boy's name is bewildering, this list of noble deeds makes his mind go completely blank, save for one persistent thought: _Eggsy knew enough to trust Merlin_. With no guarantee that every Kingsman was not allied with Valentine and Chester, Eggsy had sought out Merlin, the best of them, and put the entire organisation into his capable hands. Had that been the boy's own instinct, or was he simply doing what he thought Harry would have done?

"Eggsy and Roxy were the only ones I had with me," Merlin says. "Lancelot took out one of Valentine's satellites, and Percival cleared out Valentine's bunker." Merlin smiles, evidently remembering, and Harry wants desperately to kiss him, to draw the man's attention and regard back to him. "They were magnificent." 

"We have been better served by our newest knights than we have deserved," Arthur says, as if all of them are responsible for that old dinosaur Chester's reprehensible prejudices. Harry thinks it should be credit rather than blame that is assigned: to Merlin for training unwanted candidates into sterling knights, and to himself for having nominated Percival, ninth of that honoured name.

* * *

"Merlin," Bea says from behind him, and he swivels in his chair. He saw the reflection of her face in one of his monitors and is not startled by her voice; what does surprise him is the number of heavy tomes in her arms that she staggers forward to deposit into his. He sets them down on the research desk in his office.

"Yes?" he asks, because her tone had been cautious in a way he's not heard from his trusty second since he first picked her to be Beatrice.

"I know we're down to a handful of knights and that you've got a research project you're particularly keen on," she says, tilting her head at the volumes she'd brought in, "and it strikes me that while you're occupied we have an opportunity to cross-train the team and escalate everyone else's responsibilities."

"I'll not be slacking off —" he says, hurt.

"No, sir, you won't," she says, approaching him and holding both her hands out. Puzzled, he puts his own in hers. "We're asking that you let your team give you a bit of a break. There are no new weapons required at this time, and since we've now got more than a three-to-one ratio with the knights, any of us can cope with acting as a handler on an agent's live mission." Her touch is unexpectedly soothing, though he's not particularly tactile as a rule. "None of the _support_ staff's heads exploded when you detonated Valentine's implants."

"Chester King would have shat himself before deigning to open his new Eden to us dregs," he agrees.

"Who did he think would do any actual work in that paradise?" Bea asks, dropping his hands with a final squeeze. "If he had a soul, it was that of a bureaucrat, and he ought to have remembered his dependence on the labour of others."

"Generous of you, to ascribe to him a soul."

"I said 'if.'" She rests against the edge of the main desk, above which his monitors are stacked in a veritable phalanx. "Will you? Allow us to take on more of the weapons development and handling agents on these smaller missions in addition to being mission researchers and technical support?"

It's not a bad idea; he does want to spend more time researching visual prostheses so Harry's not stuck with a blind side (with or without eyepatches, which Merlin's already seen him demand in every shade of silk that suits his complexion) forever. He also wants to revel in every minute he spends with Eggsy and keep whatever is growing between them sheltered for as long as he can. It's actually a very good idea, one that will buy him time and keep his team engaged even as they shift gears to ensure that he can be replaced. "Not only that, but I am willing to cede some of the candidate trials over to the team."

"Really?" Beatrice has a knack for disbelieving looks that invite (if not outright demand) explanation, but long exposure to Harry has left him beyond the power of any such expression.

"What do you think: simultaneous or successive trials for Bedivere, Lamorak, Bors, and Gareth?" He favours successive, but is open to having his mind changed by a reasoned argument. There is nothing to be said about the number of traitors Kingsman was harbouring.

"Successive; we can learn from one trial to improve the next. And if any knight can produce four top candidates in one go, they might be wasting their time playing James Bloody Bond when they could have had a glamorous career in HR."

He laughs and shoos her away, already turning to the top book in the pile. "Be off with you, Bea."

*

His fingers are slotted between Eggsy's still too-prominent ribs and so he can feel every breath his lad takes with pinpoint sensitivity. What he can't do is see, first because Eggsy had plucked the glasses right off his face and then because he'd closed his eyes, the better to let Eggsy kiss his eyelids and rub their noses together. He has no idea how Eggsy knows that that simple sweetness is enough to make him feel young again (only far more confident and vital than he'd been as a shy and serious teenager, even after Excalibur had plucked him out of uni and installed him at Kingsman).

He's equally uncertain as to how Eggsy is making his poky little flat that's still got blindingly bare white walls feel like a sun-drenched bit of luxury just by rocking on his lap and kissing him, all sweet-lipped and enthusiastic. Never mind, he's answered his own question.

"Eggsy lad, sweetheart," he says even as Eggsy's got his face in his hands, moving it so that every inch of his jaw is dusted with a kiss, "let me take you to my bed."

Eggsy grins at him, brighter than a Klieg light, and says, "Yes, _please_," but he's evidently bound and determined to make the trip difficult, because he keeps kissing him and splitting Merlin's attention between that wonderful mouth and the path they're charting through his flat. Eggsy walks backwards with that same easy grace he's exhibited for as long as Merlin's known him; everyone who saw bruises on him and told themselves to believe his tales of clumsiness should be rounded up and shot for not giving a toss about his abuse at his stepfather's fists.

That the lad has won his way out of there and into Merlin's arms is a gift Merlin vows to spend the rest of his life earning. "Christ above, but I love you," he says, not quite meaning to be loud enough to be heard over the sounds of two pairs of jeans hitting the wooden floor of his bedroom.

Eggsy is too busy whisking off his socks and then peeling his pants down to rake an interrogative gaze over him, so Merlin (feeling like a fool in just his pants and socks) stands frozen until he hears that lovely voice say, "Glad I ain't in this alone."

He'll have to ask Harry to be sure, but hearing that feels like what coming back to life must be like.

He's tumbled Eggsy back onto the unmade bed before the lad's got his shirt halfway off, and that's fine because that lithe bared belly is calling to Merlin's mouth. He noses the t-shirt upwards, enjoying the softness under his lips, the way every hitch in Eggsy's breathing buzzes against them. He pulls his hand out from under Eggsy's head so that he can put both on his man's naked hips, which are flexing as he tries to spread his legs. But Merlin's got a plan and won't be moved from his position next to the lad even when Eggsy grumbles his frustration. He keeps trailing his mouth up, exposing more of that undulating form and Eggsy finally grabs at his own hem and snaps the shirt over his head decisively. His nipples are pale brown until Merlin, nosing into the grooves of generous pectoral muscles, licks delicately on each until they have both gone sweetly pink.

"Merlin, please," Eggsy begs, gasping when Merlin covers his chest with his own and reaches down with a spit-slicked hand for the thick cock laid pretty as a picture between their bellies.

"I have you, sweetheart," he says, kissing his man's mouth open and running his thumb along the length of the cock that's burning between them. It feels like velvet in his hand, the heat and richness of the skin, and he's glad he's taller than Eggsy, has the length of limb that means he can keep his grip on the lad's pretty prick while he teases at Eggsy's rosy mouth with his tongue, drawing it in long sweeps along the line where the inside of Eggsy's lower lip turns into inviting slickness. He can feel Eggsy panting onto his tongue, each ragged exhalation like a shot of lightning up his spine. He makes a warm cup of his hand for Eggsy's bollocks, heavy and damp now with sweat, keeps the heel of his hand moving against the base of the lad's cock, and presses his fingers into the plushness of that magnificent arse. 

Eggsy is writhing now, sucking on his tongue, hands holding his face still. Eggsy tears their mouths apart and points his chin at the ceiling, his hair scraping loudly against the pillow, and Merlin sucks instead on his collarbone and throat, his hand moving more quickly now on the lad's prick, his arm thudding against Eggsy's sternum with each motion, and Eggsy is flushed and squirming and entirely incandescent, and Merlin is already anticipating how low he'll fall once this glorious high is done (why can he not just appreciate the moment?) and noting, with one corner of his mind, that he's tenting his pants to a ludicrous degree, and then, and then . . . Eggsy comes on a long wail that sounds ecstatic and pained and liberated all at once.

There is come on Merlin's back and head and Eggsy's little flushed nipple, and as Eggsy's shaky fingers smear it into his scalp, Merlin rubs against Eggsy's warm hip and comes into his distended pants. He burrows into his lad's neck, unprepared to feel hot hands at his hips pushing his sodden pants down, past his ankles, and to have those pants used as a rag to wipe them both down. Eggsy strains upward to kiss him and then hops out of the bed to throw the pants into the en-suite sink.

Merlin can't control his face just then, so he's not sure to what degree it is broadcasting his feeling of loss, but Eggsy is as kind as ever and snuggles back in with him, drawing up the cotton sheet and saying into Merlin's chest, "It's all very well for you with those socks on, but I need some warmth too." Merlin wraps his arms around the lad all the more tightly, presses his cheek to the soft brightness of Eggsy's hair, and throws his leg over the hip slotted temptingly next to his.

* * *

Dr. Hyde really needs to update her lecture on discharging patients; Harry's got it memorised at this point. "And I know you've heard all this before," she says, suddenly deviating from the script, "but your memory is a lucky accident; you could so easily have sustained significant brain damage, given your cranial injuries. So please consider how narrowly you escaped a life in which you've no recollection of my smiling face and comport yourself with a little more care."

Far be it from a gentleman to argue with a lady, however illogical the lady proves to be. "Of course," he says smoothly.

"I've advised Arthur and Merlin about your health and capabilities," she continues blithely on, evidently not believing a word of his false promise, "and stated my conviction that your best course is to begin training immediately to adjust to a monocular life."

That sounds much more reasonable than he was expecting. "Certainly." He casts about for the name of the physical therapist who attended him last time. "Can Marco be made available?"

"He's on his honeymoon, so no. I believe Arthur has devised a course of training that will sharpen the skills you will need in the immediate future." That is . . . ominous. John has never really warmed to him, perhaps because Harry never invited him to get shagged to within an inch of his life, and their specialities do not overlap; what John deems necessary might well be a waste of time. Then again, Merlin will always put in a good word for him, so perhaps he's worrying over nothing. "Ah, and here he is now."

Harry resents being taken by surprise by his new king, who looks dangerously dapper while Harry is stuck without pomade or anything more form-fitting than his red dressing-gown. "Hello, Arthur."

"Hello, Galahad. Thank you, Dr. Hyde." Arthur waits for her departure before sitting next to him on his adjustable bed. "We need you. Not only because you're the senior knight and our numbers have been substantially diminished since it appears quite a few of our peers chose to throw in their lot with Valentine and Chester."

"Why, then?" Harry asks, genuinely curious and wishing Arthur would hasten to the point. Perhaps just sitting in Arthur's seat increases the propensity for circumlocution.

"The nature of our missions has shifted significantly. Where we once worked to maintain a balance that would keep the world on an even keel, now we have to create it. When Valentine's implants activated, they did away with the ruling class of nearly every country of note, even if a few nominal leaders were in his cells rather than his VIP area. There is an unprecedented power vacuum around the world, and while Roxy and Eggsy are eliminating most of the minor threats to emerge from various outbreaks of internecine warfare, it is falling to our more seasoned knights to guide societies to establish leadership that can sustain itself for the next several generations." Arthur speaks without haste or hesitation, and Harry is impressed rather against his will. "Your personal charm and natural authority make you ideally suited to the role of exemplar, and no-one will find it difficult to believe that you are landed gentry with a vested interest in ensuring a smooth and stable world order."

It's seductive, the very idea that he could change the tide of the world just by being himself, and he admires Arthur's skill even as he allows himself a moment of regret that he never bothered to invite the man to use that silver tongue on him. "Even like this?" he asks, pointing to the navy-blue eyepatch he wears to hide the scarring surrounding his acrylic prosthesis. Seeing his ravaged face for the first time had been enough to put him off his food for days until Merlin had barged into his room, yelled a bit, and hugged Harry's head to his chest.

Arthur's shrewd expression is reassuring, if only because Harry knows he's thought all of this through. "The injury shows that you were caught up in something that will be assumed to be V-Day, and the fact that you're active shows that you were more than a match for your opponents, whatever their strength. Frankly, I couldn't in good conscience send you out _without_ some similar mark."

Have the other knights suffered injuries as grievous? He's heard nothing from the adjoining rooms of the medical wing, and Arthur looks as hale as ever, though admittedly his work as a sniper usually put him out of others' reach. 

"But you do need to prepare," Arthur continues. "You're due in the gymnasium in twenty minutes, to practice hand-to-hand fighting." There is a hint of a smile on the man's rather thin lips. "I advise taking the time to stretch, as you'll be up against the fittest knight we've got. Good day."

Harry is shucking his dressing-gown and pyjamas, which might have been crisp when he was first wrestled into them, with a song in his heart at the very thought of leaving the room. In the cupboard he finds tapered joggers sized for him and a dark fitted t-shirt. As he's pulling it over his head, trying to keep the collar from scraping the damaged side of his face, he's aware that his excitement is at least in part due to the fact that he'll be seeing Eggsy momentarily. 

Though — has Eggsy seen _him_? Merlin had said, when Harry pressed, that Harry had first awoken thinking himself thirty years younger and hadn't recognised anyone but him. Harry had immediately joked that Merlin looked just the same as he had back then — even though Merlin had had hair soft and dark as the night and a boy's big eyes when they first met; the only thing that hasn't changed is how much Harry wants him. Still, had Eggsy sat at his bedside once more and been hurt that Harry hadn't known him? He'll know the answer from how the boy greets him, and he can surely make any unintended slight up to him.

Smiling, he enters the gymnasium, only to find it empty. He will save some of the more appealing stretches for when he has an audience, he decides, but Arthur's advice should not be ignored. He touches his toes, does some jumping jacks — despite the nightmares he has had that his prosthesis might pop out and roll about the first time he attempted any kind of vigorous movement — and completes some basic stretches.

Precisely on time, as if the boy wants to set himself apart from his mentor in terms of punctuality, the door opens. Harry looks over with a smile, has to adjust his stance to see out of his right eye, and then gapes like a landed fish when he realises it is Roxanne, not Eggsy, standing in exercise gear and waiting for him to engage.

"Would you like to warm up or shall we get started?" she asks. She is dressed just the same as he is, down to the lack of jewellery, and her hair has been plaited tightly and the end tucked under somehow so as not to provide anything to grab. "Galahad?" She waits, but he is too thrown by her appearance — _she_ is the fittest knight? — to respond. "We can warm up a bit, or we can run drills, just as you like."

Little as he wants to be at her mercy, he has never got anywhere in life by taking a shortcut; Merlin will be proud of him if he works diligently to restore his fitness and wrest the top-dog spot back from this upstart. "Drills," he says, trying to work out where to aim on a training partner so much smaller and more female than he's used to.

With taped-up hands and feet, they run each kick, each block, each blow, until he is satisfied. The set of Roxanne's mouth suggests that she might not be, but that is hardly his concern; he knows what it takes to get it done in the field, and her being a martinet is simply irrelevant. "Spar," she finally says, choosing the training station that has two adjacent walls forming a corner. He remembers hearing Eggsy ask for some indoor structures suitable for basic parkour one day when he walked by the Lancelot candidates and recalls how Eggsy's voice had trailed off, attention gone as Harry seized it instead; it looks like Merlin got his minions to give Eggsy what he wants, and Harry is looking forward to utilising the new structure against Roxanne, whose head does not even clear the walls.

"Shall we?" Roxanne asks, holding out her hand. He shakes it firmly and lets fly a punch. She slides away and then the game is on.

Only it's not going as games have gone before. She is connecting on some hits — hard, bruising hits — but seems unaffected by the ones he's managing to land. Her feet are a blur of motion, kicking up at his face every so often like a dog testing its chain to snap its jaws at an intruder. He prays Merlin isn't watching, because he cannot think of when he's put on a poorer show. Whatever secret fears he was harbouring about feeling rage rise as he fought are moot; his lumbering about is a far cry from the assured deadliness he'd commanded in that excuse for a church. 

Roxanne keeps coming at him, implacable, absorbing the momentum when his knuckles slam into her jaw and twisting so that she is at his back and has him crashing down. Quick as a snake, she slithers on top of him, pressing him mercilessly to the mat, one hand establishing a firm grip on his throat. There is no part of himself that he can lift off the mat, whether the motion dislodges her or not, despite their significant size difference; in his belly he feels the hot, sour rush of disappointment in himself. He closes his eye and taps out. 

Her weight rolls off him and he looks up to see her extending that same damned hand to him. "Get up, Galahad. We'll do this again tomorrow."

*

When he wakes up in the morning, he's still sore from Roxanne's ministrations, but he dresses and makes his way to the gymnasium hours ahead of their appointment; he will not be so cavalier about his abilities — or hers — again. To his surprise, Arthur is there and willing to let him mimic his own exercise routine. Arthur leaves for a meeting and Harry, bored, waits for the next knight to wander in.

It's a group of Merlin's minions instead, who will only let him remain in the gymnasium — which was, not very long ago, exclusively for the agents — if he participates instead of merely spectating. They are into some sort of advanced yoga that forces him to twist his limbs up like a plaited loaf, and he hears more than one pop as his joints move in unaccustomed ways. "Good show, Galahad," one says from directly behind him when he's got his arse in the air, and he might be plotting his revenge but he's never above flirtation, even if Merlin's minions are off-limits in his own personal code, so he flexes tautly and takes his time coming back down to the mat.

When Roxanne entered, he does not know, but she is there as the minions file out. A pair of them exchange greetings with her, but otherwise she is all business, coming to stand in front of him. He can do this; he's ready. They shake and attack.

He gives no quarter nor asks for none, and she is breathing heavily now, their panting breaths syncopated, and he feels a surge of triumph that he is still on his own two feet despite the dizzy spells that cloud his eye and brain periodically. "Much better," she says, and he kicks at her belly again; he has no need of her approval, not when he's been the pride and joy of Kingsman for decades.

Her speed makes it only a glancing blow. She sidesteps, for the most part, and brings her knee up sharply, halting just before making contact with his bollocks. "I would have had you there," she informs him smugly, denying him the catharsis of avenging himself. She pivots to cool off by stretching. A hot and pounding shower will suit him better than lying on the mat beside her, so he heads for the locker room, peeling the sodden, sticky tape from his hands and whipping off his eyepatch.

His eyes are squeezed tightly shut — what will happen if shampoo enters his uncovered left eye socket he does not care to know — when he hears the shower next to his turn on. With row upon row of empty stalls to choose from, Roxanne has decided to invade his space. He turns his back and keeps lathering up. A spray of cool water glances across his shoulder blades, surely accidentally, but he scrubs his face and opens his eyes, looking down at her over the low wall separating their open stalls.

Her eyes are closed and she's got her hands in her hair, fingers parting the sweat-curled locks so that the water can hit her scalp directly. Her breasts — about the size of oranges and as round as only young tits can be — have lifted and separated, and between and below them he can see red marks from her athletic brassiere. Over the sound of their showers he can hear a door bang open, and he turns back to his own spray, intending to soap up and get out.

"Rox!" he hears Eggsy call, and without having made a conscious decision, he can feel his hands slowing down, moving alluringly rather than briskly on his own body. "Got you somethin'!"

The boy's tone sounds friendly rather than romantic, but Roxanne is making no move to cover her nakedness. Even if she is bound and determined to seduce Eggsy, Harry can and will win the boy's attention away from her; he had Eggsy in the palm of his hand all through the Lancelot trials, to the point where Eggsy had repeatedly shown that he would rather be at his comatose side than in Roxanne's bed. 

Eggsy's abominable trainers squeak against the tile floor and he rounds the corner, already talking. "Saw this an' thought of you —" he is saying when he cuts himself off. Harry has to shift to see him; he'd forgotten about the acrylic eye and ugly scarring, and now he has nowhere to hide as he's put himself on display in front of the boy whose lust for him was very nearly a sustaining force. Eggsy's breath catches in his throat. "H– Hey, Harry," he says, careful and quiet.

"Hello, Eggsy," Harry says, turning again to give Eggsy an eyeful, and the boy gives his cock only a cursory glance, for which Harry forgives him because the smile on his face is real and sincerely relieved.

"Good to see you up and about," Eggsy says without a hint of innuendo, though the lip-biting is alluring to a maddening degree. "Let's catch up when you're out of Medical, yeah?" He turns to Roxanne, who's been diligently washing her hair all this time. "And you, Roxy, got this for you." He holds up a shower pouf shaped like a frog, bulbous plastic eyes set atop the round green cloud of its body.

Roxanne just laughs at the sight and Eggsy beams. Harry, observing the interplay closely, notes that Eggsy's gaze is as close to absent-minded as a red-blooded man's is likely to get when faced with a wet, naked woman. "Daisy helped me pick it out," Eggsy explains. "Got to go, catch you later."

"Mission?" Roxanne asks, as if Eggsy, in his trackies, looks remotely prepared for any such thing. Harry vigorously soaps up his torso until there are shining bubbles adorning his skin.

"Nah, Merlin an' I are driving Mum and Dais to their new place. Cambridge," he says, eyes darting back to Harry.

"Good luck with the move," Roxanne says, flicking some water Eggsy's way. Eggsy looks gorgeous with droplets shining on his face, Harry notes without even a flicker of surprise, and his backside is as taut as ever. Harry forgets himself so far as to step out of his stall to watch the boy go, and Roxanne takes the opportunity afforded by the lack of a wall to look him up and down, far more openly appreciative than Eggsy had been.

As she turns away to pump body wash on her new pouf, he catches her smile.

* * *

Eggsy looks thoughtful when he walks in (it's a very good look for him, and Merlin wholeheartedly approves), but he smiles reflexively when he catches sight of Merlin, curled up in the plush, wide chair in the corner of his office with a book on his lap (and that's even better).

"It feels wrong to look at you, all nine miles of leg tucked up, and think _sexy_, right, but at the same time, _praying mantis_," Eggsy announces, sauntering over with his thumbs in his trackies' waistband.

"You are a deeply disturbed individual," Merlin agrees, drawing him down by his faded t-shirt for a kiss whilst they're in the privacy of his office. The material is thin and, surprisingly, damp. "What's this?"

"Rox was in the showers when I caught up with her," Eggsy says, extricating the book from his grasp and pulling Merlin's legs down. Merlin lets himself be rearranged, anticipating the welcome weight of his lad on his lap. Eggsy comes at him knees first, tucking them snugly along Merlin's hips. "She thought it was cute to spray me a little."

"And yet you still gave her her gift," Merlin says, drawing his fingertips up Eggsy's spine, velvety skin untroubled as yet by scars. He loves how open the lad's heart is.

"Already in her hot little hands, an' I know better than to fight a bruiser when her blood is up," Eggsy says, laughing into the hinge of Merlin's jaw. How the lad can make an ordinary touch to his deadened skin feel like he's laying down lines of fire is wondrous. "Merlin," Eggsy whispers.

"Mmm?"

"Thank you."

That's enough to derail him, when he meant to interrogate Eggsy about the significance of the frogs to him and to Roxy, why Eggsy insists on buying frogs for her with the same frequency that he buys duck toys for his sister. "What for?"

"It ain't your job to find my mum work or a crèche for Dais," Eggsy says, subdued. It was the lad himself who found the job, actually, after Merlin had said something about his former university's call to action; Cambridge needed people to rebuild and sustain it after V-Day, else the seat of learning that had lasted nearly a millennium would cease to exist. Eggsy was the one who realised getting his mum out of London was a good first step, and that finding her work as a porter in one of the women's colleges would keep her active. That university employees had access to quality childcare was the only part Merlin had taken it upon himself to check.

"Love you, love your girls, isn't that right, sweetheart?" Merlin says, cutting him off before he can get rolling. Eggsy's arms wind tightly around him, so Merlin keeps letting his fingertips glory in the lad's soft skin. "I'd do far more to make you happy, lad." There's evidently something still eating at him, but they do need to get going.

"Even let me drive?" Eggsy asks, snaking the keys to the Kingsman cab from Merlin's pocket; the lad is as light-fingered as ever, which he really shouldn't find arousing.

"Cheeky monkey," is all he lets himself say, and Eggsy kisses the tip of his jutting blade of a nose.

*

Eggsy sings when he drives, Merlin is pleased to discover. It doesn't seem to matter the genre; his mobile holds everything from Etta James to some horrendously catchy thing called "Baby Shark" and all of it is met with equal enthusiasm. Merlin scrolls through the full track listing, pausing to note which of his favourites are Eggsy's as well. If he plays his cards right, he might be in for a private concert one night.

Just the thought is enough to make his pulse accelerate and he peels off his leather jacket and rolls the sleeves of his shirt up to his elbows. "Unfair, love," Eggsy says, temporarily abandoning the chorus of "Give a Little Respect," and while Merlin's still trying to work that one out, Eggsy starts trailing delicate fingertips along the most prominent vein in his right forearm. "Bloody gorgeous, you are." Eggsy's warm fingers are now gently, gently stroking his arm against the grain of dark hair, and Merlin is overwhelmed by the simplicity of the touch, how willing Eggsy is to cherish him in the most ordinary but unexpected of ways.

"Eggsy lad," he manages to say despite his knotted throat. Eggsy's hand lifts just long enough to snap the music off and then is back again, turning his arm over and tracing the more vulnerable veins there.

"Your voice goes right through me," Eggsy says, bringing their linked hands up so he can lay a solemn whisper of a kiss against Merlin's inner wrist. "Dangerous, prob'ly, how much I like it. V-Day, I was ready to die, long as I had your voice in my ear."

"Don't," he begs, his voice just gravel. He knows they are still moving, but Eggsy's control of the car is so superb and his command over Merlin's attention is so absolute that he registers nothing but the reality of his lover, quiet and focused.

"Nah, too much I still wanna hear you say," Eggsy says, slanting a look at him before turning into Rowley Way estates.

*

"Feels wrong, not even bein' able to offer you a cuppa when you're doin' so much for us," Michelle frets. "I know the kettle's in one of these boxes," she says, heading toward the three marked _kitchen_.

"No need, happy to be of service," Merlin says, surprised by how well Michelle is taking his introduction as Eggsy's partner. Perhaps she's too overwhelmed by gratitude currently to consider how far out of his league her son is.

"Sorry, I didn't even ask your name, proper name. Merlin's a cute nickname, though," she says.

"Ain't it?" Eggsy says, strolling over with his sister in his arms to lean against him. "It's cause he's like a wizard with all the tech stuff and computers at the shop."

"I've been called that for a long time," he agrees, eyeing Eggsy's face to catch the moment awareness dawns on his lad. "Bet your lad doesn't even know my proper name."

Eggsy looks so horrified at the realisation (and Daisy does such a stellar job of mimicking his gobsmacked expression) that Merlin laughs. He extends his hand to Michelle. "It's Jasper. Jasper Gordon."

"Like your eyes. Did your mum get lucky you turned out with green eyes or did she just like the name?"

Eggsy knows as little about his family particulars as Michelle, but he at least can tell that Merlin needs a reassuring touch. "I've never been told," he finally tells Michelle, scraping together a smile as Eggsy bumps their hips together.

"Here, mum," Eggsy says, handing over his sister. "We'll start loading up the cab." He nudges Merlin toward the small and rather dingy bedroom that must once have been his. It's not exactly squalid, but functional is probably the kindest word that has any claim on accuracy. There's a stack of boxes in the middle of the room, the bottom two bearing Eggsy's name and the rest marked with Daisy's. How is it possible that both of those lives can be stored in so few boxes?

At least the Cambridge flat comes fully furnished, so all of these cheap wardrobes and frameless beds can stay here and rot.

"Jasper," Eggsy says.

"Mmm?" he asks.

"D'you mind bein' called Merlin?"

"Not at all." He hasn't really thought of himself as Jasper since the position of Merlin was created for him. He owes Eggsy a little more truth than that, though. "I like the way you say it."

"Close enough to _darlin'_ that you hear that when I say it?" Eggsy asks, stepping close. "Cause that's what I'm saying."

"I know," he says, and drops a quick kiss on Eggsy's pretty mouth.

"You know everything," Eggsy says, sounding enormously content, and kisses him back, just as quick and settled.

*

Their journey is blessedly easy (they picked their time of day well, evidently, for avoiding both traffic on the M11 and much interaction with any of Michelle's neighbours), which is all to the good, considering that the four of them are squeezed together up front as the back is given over entirely to boxes. There's not even room enough for the squashed sausage-roll that Eggsy calls JB, and Merlin's glad he's got Hermia bringing the pup from the HQ kennel tomorrow when she goes to install Kingsman security on Michelle's new flat. Eggsy has his sister on his lap, his cheek pressed to her hair, and she's fallen asleep under Merlin's discarded jacket. "Like Thumbelina," Eggsy murmurs.

Merlin parks and they all alight, stretching their limbs. Eggsy's opening the back and stacking boxes high in his arms, his square chin hooked over the side of the topmost one, putting his cheek (bearing a very clear imprint of Daisy's duck-shaped slide) on unintentional display. As if the lad needs the help in being irresistible.

Michelle exclaims over the wealth of natural light the new flat gets, and in only an hour, all the boxes are in the flat and Eggsy's sent him out to show his girls their new garden while he assembles a crib for his sister. Daisy toddles among the flowers, still dewy from an evidently intense bout of rain, and Merlin watches the magnitude of what Eggsy's done for the pair of them wash over Michelle. He sincerely hopes she does nothing to fuck it up.

She doesn't try to keep them when Merlin hands over the keys and bids them farewell, but she does thank him and then wrap her son up in a tight embrace. Eggsy looks blissful at the thought of having got her to safety, and his step on the stairs down is practically a bounce. He pins Merlin up against the black cab for a thorough snog and drives back to London, singing all the way and grinning like a lunatic whenever Merlin joins in.

*

"Hero handled Sagramore through the mission in Karachi without missing a beat; she might want to specialise in handling," Beatrice reports. "And Caliban has been testing the neurotoxins and thinks he's found something more effective."

"Excellent," he says, meaning it. His team are all exceptional and rarely get the credit they're due from the knights.

"So you see, you could bury yourself in research for days, perhaps even take a holiday, and Kingsman wouldn't burn to the ground," she continues.

"Never you mind my schedule. We'll have to organise some sort of gesture of appreciation soon." With _this_ Arthur running the show, he might even get the remaining knights to acknowledge how much others' work contributes to their stunning success. "Let me think about it." He looks up and sees Eggsy, in an ancient vest and soft sleep trousers, making his way to the bed he's perched on. "I'll speak with you tomorrow, Beatrice."

"Have a lovely night, Merlin," she says, sounding amused rather than alarmed by his sudden breathlessness. He's so used to being alone in his office at all hours that he forgot that Bea could probably see through his specs at the man about to share his bed. He taps at his glasses to disconnect the call.

"You look —" he says, and Eggsy looks honestly surprised.

"In this? Nah, guv, you're far too easy."

"For you? Yes." Eggsy wrinkles his nose at him as if deploring his taste, then waves the conversation aside whilst depriving him of his glasses.

"Been wantin' to get my hands on you all day," Eggsy says, reclining like a lord against the pair of pillows. "C'mere." 

Merlin drapes himself atop his lad, sinking into Eggsy's easy kisses, completely unprepared for Eggsy to roll them so that he's flat on his back. "Lift up," Eggsy commands, and he raises his arms so that his t-shirt can be stripped from him. "Now these," Eggsy says, almost scolding, and tugs at his belt and jeans. He's naked and face-down before he quite knows how and Eggsy is kneeling astride him, putting those strong hands to good use, pressing the stress out of his back.

The appreciative noises he's making are completely embarrassing, but Eggsy, wonderfully undeterred, massages him until he feels as limp as a wet flannel. Eggsy finishes his toes and returns to his arse, squeezing it fondly, and at last pauses his ruthless ministrations. "Don't go," he pleads when he feels Eggsy's weight shift off him.

"Just gonna get some slick, love," Eggsy says, kissing the side of his head. "Love you down proper."

"Don't go," he says again. Eggsy can finger him into oblivion some other night; all he wants now is to be cuddled close.

"Not even to get your pyjamas? Know you feel the cold." 

"Not with you on top of me," he says, lethargically shifting his hips until Eggsy stops twisting to flip the blanket over them both and settle his weight firmly against him. Eggsy's mouth is at his nape now, and Merlin cannot conceive of a more perfect moment than this.

* * *

"Out of my sight, Galahad," Dr. Hyde says, and Harry looks over at Merlin for confirmation.

"If you can withstand Lancelot's exemplary beatings, then it's simply squandering resources to keep you in Medical," Merlin says, prim as can be, though his eyes are smiling at him.

"There are other tests, of course," Arthur says, strolling in with impeccable timing, "but your physical fitness must be our immediate concern."

"Must it be Lancelot?" he asks. He's not quite sure he trusts that little smile she wore; still less does he know whether he was meant to see it, given how prickly she's been every time they're alone.

"Lancelot is currently available," Arthur says, brooking no discussion of the knights' schedules.

"And you are not?" Harry asks Merlin directly, the privilege of old friends, those who had been comrades even before Arthur's arrival in these hallowed halls.

Surprise flashes across Merlin's vivid face. "I'm not a proper test for you," he says, the sweet rumble of his voice sounding like an apology Harry knows he hasn't earned. "But I can meet you in the gymnasium in forty minutes."

"Excellent," Harry says, just restraining himself from purring at the thought. The time, perversely, _crawls_, and he's actually in the gymnasium early.

Merlin, he notes approvingly, looks particularly loose-limbed and rested today. There is power in his lithe form, evident once his dreadful jumpers and old-fashioned glasses are stripped off him. He lets Merlin tape his hands and feet, watching as Merlin does the same for himself, tearing the tape with his teeth at the last. Immediately, Harry is crowding him, hands up and ready.

"Fighting in such close quarters makes sense to mitigate the weakness of your having a blind side," Merlin says after several minutes, jabbing at him with loose fists, "but only if you're assured your enemy has no weapons. I could have slid a knife into you anywhere," he finishes, trailing long fingers up Harry's left side.

"Noted," he says, because if Merlin is going to be tactile, Harry is hardly going to discourage him. "And?"

"And," Merlin says, driving a shoulder into his breastbone, which Harry counters by clinging to him like a limpet and punching at his kidneys, "I'm working on the visual prosthesis, I promise you. You'll not be at a disadvantage for long if I can help it."

"I know," he says, revelling in Merlin's grunts as his blows land. "Even this time, your glasses saved my life." He'd made Dr. Hyde explain the trajectory of Valentine's bullet, which was not so much poorly aimed as deflected and, crucially, slowed by the high-density plastic of his spectacle lenses; they'd been fashioned, of course, by the resident wizard. "Merlin," he breathes into the man's ear, smelling his sweat, "let me say thank you properly."

"Harry," Merlin says, eeling free of his grip, "don't make me keep saying no to my best friend."

Fine. He can be patient a little longer while they continue this dance. Shamelessly, he springs while Merlin's still waiting for some sort of acknowledgment and gets his legs around Merlin, twisting to bring them both crashing down.

"Oh, you bastard," Merlin says, rising and swiping at his mouth with the back of one hand. If he thinks that the gesture is hiding his grin, he's very much mistaken, and Harry thrills to the challenge, rolling to his feet and waving him forward.

"Merlin," he hears — of course it's bloody Lancelot, come to spoil his fun — "you're needed in the Research laboratory."

"Of course," Merlin says, dropping his arms. "Thank you, Lancelot."

Before Harry can muster a protest or do more than reach out for him, Merlin's already tugging at the tape on his hands, using his teeth — Harry zeroes in on the sight of those charmingly crooked teeth — and heading to the showers. Roxanne, for some reason, watches Merlin go with sharply analytical eyes and steps in front of him when he moves to follow. "Have you had enough, or shall we have our final showdown now so you can leave Medical with your first round of tests done?"

He looks down his nose at her, his blood still pumping hot throughout his body. "As you like," he drawls as if she's little more than a nuisance. She is unsettlingly well-informed.

She must have skin as thick as a rhinoceros's; nothing gets under it. She smiles up at him. "Would you care to wager on the outcome?"

It's the first time she's said anything interesting. "What do you propose?"

She does nothing so obvious as square her shoulders or lift her chin, but he can still tell that it takes a surge of courage for her to speak. "Your reputation speaks for itself, Galahad; we watched footage of you during our NLP training, and Merlin said you're at the top of the list whenever the mission's a honeypot." It's absurdly arousing, thinking of Merlin — who'd been in his ear throughout every one of those missions — combing through footage to find the moments that showcase him at the peak of his game, and considering how well Merlin must have learnt all of those encounters in order to use them as teaching materials.

His silence seems to be throwing her off slightly, but he is disinclined to come to her aid. "And I want to fuck," she finishes.

"Brava," he says, half-sincere; he appreciates candour. "What makes you think I choose to fuck women?"

"I'm not asking for all women —" she snaps.

"I don't believe you're asking a question at all," he says silkily, rather enjoying himself now.

"If you tap out _again_," she says, revealing a level of bitchiness she's kept fairly well hidden up to this point, "then you owe me a good and proper fuck."

"And when you lose?" he asks, deliberately provocative.

"I haven't yet." 

That's just the answer he would have made, had their positions been reversed, and he finds himself almost liking her. "Then let's begin," he says.

*

There's enough of a chill in the evening air that he would ordinarily light a fire, but he refuses to lend the scene of his upcoming forfeit any sort of romantic light. He'd tapped out — he's not yet fully recovered, evidently — and Roxanne had grinned with a mean triumph. Let her come, then, and welcome; if she believes bearding the lion in his den is an additional feather in her cap, she will come to learn how sorely she is mistaken.

But it is a poor sportsman who refuses to pay up, so Harry resolves to go about his evening without worrying overmuch about what must happen before the night is through. His doorbell rings and there, on his step, is Roxanne, the black Kingsman cab peeling away behind her making the green of her dress look vernal and fresh. There is something familiar about her that catches at his memory before ultimately eluding it, something beyond the Brigitte Bardot air she's aping with her warm sheaf of hair and figure-hugging frock. "Do come in, my dear," he says, the words rising with readiness to his lips; insincerity is hardly his worst fault, particularly when it is indistinguishable from good manners.

"Thank you," she says, equally smooth and chill, stepping past him and pausing at the foot of the stairs instead of traipsing toward his parlour, where there's a drinks cart just waiting to be put to use.

"My, we are eager," he says, though he understands the impulse to claim the prize before it can be snatched away. "Should we not talk first?"

"This isn't a romance, Galahad," she says, standing as tall as she can on her ridiculous high heels.

That's a bit of a surprise. "Then why have you sought me out?" It's made him think the better of her, honestly, that even carrying a torch for him has not made her any less relentless in their bouts; a Kingsman needs to be ruthless. But if there is no tender feeling in her for him, then what exactly is she after?

"From what I've heard, it's very nearly a rite of passage, that a new Kingsman should find his — or _her_ — way into your bed." She's very good, he'll give her that much; no-one but another Kingsman would be able to tell how purposefully she is deflecting his question with a touch of aggression.

"Did you think your invitation got lost in the mail?"

She passes the test, laughing charmingly and without a spark of sentiment. "I almost believe that you _would_ issue a formal directive."

Summons or not, she is the third Lancelot who will grace his bed, and the thought lends him the fire she's been trying to stir into life. "Most remiss of me," he murmurs, gesturing up the stairs. She takes her time ascending, spindly heels hanging off the edge of each step, her frock swishing about her thighs as she climbs. There is a delicious perfume misted over her skin that very nearly makes him touch where she's bare.

"Now, I believe you specified a 'good and proper fuck,'" he says, watching her take in every detail of his bedroom, from the king-sized four-poster — framework exposed without canopies and curtains — to the mahogany wardrobes. "Meaning you come . . . thrice at the very least?" He smiles at the look of surprise on her face. "I do work well under pressure."

"I appreciate competence," she says, "and I believe in learning from the best."

"Ah," Harry says, understanding at last, perhaps more than she wishes. "If you believe Kingsman will have you 'fuck for England,' you are certainly correct, and it is to your credit that you wish to keep those missions at the same high standard as others." What she has _not_ said outright is that she has not yet had a partner who could satisfy her, but the admission of her competence kink was more revealing than she intended; he knows of no boys her age who could wring a woman out utterly, with the exception of himself . . . nearly thirty years ago.

That's thirty years of experience he can put to good use now. "A honeypot," he says, approaching her and feeling a faint thrill in his limbs at the way her head tips warily back to watch him, "is actually less about the fucking than about the intimacy you can establish." She nods, eyes fixed on his. "Undressing your partner is often a good start. A nickname — implying that you have a special connection — is another."

She's breathing just a bit more quickly now. "Roxy," she offers, her voice steady.

"No," he denies her, just to watch her pulse flutter in her throat. He's still soft in his pants, and will be surprised indeed if anything she tries is enough to get him aroused; she is beautiful, and something about her remains maddeningly familiar, but none of this was his idea. "Turn, my dear." Her skirt flares out in a swaying circle as she pirouettes, the pretty lines of it making up his mind for him on how to proceed. She comes to a stop once she's facing him again, one eyebrow cocked impertinently, as if she thinks she can wrest control back from him. But this is not a game, and he will not cede anything so easily. "Well? I believe I asked you to undress me."

She very nearly takes a step back but catches herself. Her purse — some small flimsy thing that Merlin would create a special line of invective for, distinct from her crippling shoes — gets tossed onto the bed. She steps close, discarding his ivory eyepatch first — he braces for a comment about his acrylic eye though she's seen it after every sparring session, and is almost disappointed when she says nothing — and starting to work at his tie. The fragrance of her perfume is even more appealing now, overlaid by the scent of her arousal, just beginning to seep into the air. "Pay attention," he instructs the top of her head, which just comes to his shoulder. "Note the materials of your mark's garments and accessories, consider what can be used as a weapon and be sure to keep the ones you want in a place where you will have ready access to them. No flinging of ties across the room is permitted." She nods, studious and serious, fingertips smoothing over the silky sheen of his tie. "This one is made of reinforced but not bulletproof material; the piece itself can be pulled apart along the stripes to create zip-ties. Ties in general are good to keep close, even if you have to pretend to some enthusiasm for clumsy bondage games." Her fingers are faltering now and he lifts her chin so she has to meet his gaze. "Do you want to stop?"

"No." So defiant, and he appreciates courage.

"Do you want to fuck without the lesson?" She pauses then, her eyes darting away from his face. "I am happy to proceed either way."

One nod and he's tipping her back onto his bed, slipping off her shoes, and flipping her skirt up. She hasn't bothered with stockings — he'd seen as much on the stairs — and he strokes a hand up her thigh, too firmly to allow her to pretend the resulting shiver is from ticklishness. Lying in his bed, half-bared to his gaze, Roxanne is less perky sex-kitten and more disquietingly young and inexperienced; she could be any of the women he's seduced and abandoned in Kingsman's good name, and Harry's conscience rears its ugly head at the most inconvenient of times. Whatever her wishes, he cannot let slip this opportunity to instruct her on how to survive as a Kingsman. She needs to know what her body is capable of and how well she can keep her head throughout a night marked by pleasure, when the real is more dangerous than the feigned.

"Stockings," he says, stroking again and watching her legs part by another few millimetres, "are as useful as ties, as they can become gags, blindfolds, ropes, and more. Additionally, the unrolling of them features prominently in many men's fantasies, so it's as well to be supplied with them." The hem of her skirt is just touching her chin and he can see her eyes losing focus as she stares up at the hoop marking the centre of his [four-poster bed](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0771MTFMC/?tag=furniturecom1-20). He switches his stroke to her other thigh and those dark eyes come down to look at him, wide like she's just now fathoming what she's got herself into. Were he the type of man into whose bed Kingsman will send her, that look would make him hard as iron. "Roxanne," he says, "what do you like?"

It's not quite fair to ask, not if what he deduced earlier — that she's never had a truly satisfying experience — is true, but she bluffs well enough that he thinks she could be a card sharp; at least her tongue is capable of lying, even if her body's responses are too artlessly sincere. "I like it rough," she says firmly, just daring him to do his worst.

"Mmm," he says, and pulls her underwear — plain black without ornamentation but luxurious to the touch — off. Her curls have been trimmed down to a sleek little pelt, short enough that they do nothing to hide how flushed pink her cunt is. She may say she wants him to be rough, but he is Galahad, seventh of that honoured name, and the most storied lover in Kingsman history; no near-virgin can handle him unleashed. He'll be gentle to make sure she knows what she's talking about the next time someone asks her.

He kneels on his mattress and lifts her so that her bottom is in front of his knees and her thighs are tilted up, resting on and enclosing his. "Read your mark," he instructs again, "and decide what he's more likely to want, virgin or whore, and play that for all you're worth." The first touch of his fingers to her slick flesh makes her quiver, and he proceeds methodically, certain no-one who's seen this particular view has known just what to do with her body. He parts her folds delicately, distending the rosebud into longer, tauter lines. The rough slurp her cunt makes as it sucks his fingers down makes her eyes close and her cheeks pink. "Are you staying silent for my benefit?" he asks, and the stain on her cheeks grows darker.

"Don't," she says, harshly. "Keep doing that, but don't lecture me, don't expect me to moan, _don't_." Her eyes are open again and she looks like she would cut his head off if she could only be assured the rest of him would keep functioning without any interruption of service. At least she's _trying_ to control herself, even if she's failing miserably.

Turning his finger so that it is the cool smoothness of his nail that presses against her flesh rather than his warm fingertip has her heels scrabbling at his hips. Laying his other hand on her thigh to give his thumb easy access to her clitoris — he doesn't even have to flex his hand fully — gets her rocking forward and trying to push herself out of his reach at the same time. Neither her body nor her mind knows what to do as pleasure builds in her.

She screams when she comes, and Harry feels a surge of triumph but doesn't let up, tapping her clit relentlessly with his broad thumb and curling his fingers inside her so that she doesn't have to chase a second orgasm so much as lie still and let it bludgeon her. "This is the very least anyone you let into your bed should do for you," he says, truthfully but also pleased to have done so much without feeling a single flicker. He gets off the bed and leaves her in peace to clutch at the tattered remains of her composure whilst he undresses himself. When she's come back to herself and sees him, she gamely sits up and turns her back to him, offering access to her garment's fastenings but also, clearly, hiding her face; she really is too transparent.

The tab of her frock's zipper feels absurdly small pressed between his forefinger and thumb, but it slides down smoothly, allowing him to peel her out of her crumpled emerald wrapper. There is a flush of pink from her cheeks to a few inches above her navel, interrupted only by the tight lace of her strapless brassiere. She looks at his cock — still mostly soft — and his face, and sets her jaw as if to accept a challenge; she might have just come apart under his hands twice in rapid succession, leaving every inch of her in appealing disarray and dewy with sweat, but that defiant gesture is what gets his cock to twitch. It's possible that she doesn't know what an offering she makes of her mouth when she firms her jaw, but the contrast between soft flesh and sturdy bone is the first thing to cause a spike of lust in him. His hands find her face and he bends to kiss that pretty mouth.

A kiss is what it takes to unlock her throat, evidently, all of the little sighs and moans he'd missed earlier coming out now, and she winds her hands into his hair and pulls him with her when she lies back down. He rears back when he's unclasped her brassiere, pulling it off and seeing the unbroken sweep of her sex-flush along the length of her. She blushes all the harder when he rakes his gaze up her body, noting that neither the bedclothes nor her tumbled hair hides her nipples from view, and that against the turquoise sheen of the sheets they look rosier than ever.

She looks like Aphrodite, born from seafoam the colour of his sheets, from the dark gold of her dishevelled hair to the seashell pink of her toes, exactly as she was pictured in a [French painting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birth_of_Venus_\(Cabanel\)#/media/File:Alexandre_Cabanel_-_The_Birth_of_Venus_-_Google_Art_Project_2.jpg) he'd peeped at whenever he was actually in his father's house and not, as was best for all involved, hundreds of miles away at school. "Aphrodite," he pronounces, just to hear the name spoken aloud whilst she's unknowingly holding the pose, relieved that he's identified the stray memory that's been niggling at him since he opened his door to her.

She must think he's mocking her, because her gaze and jaw calcify instantly, but he catches hold of her wrists, presses her body into the mattress, and kisses her once more. "Dite," he says again, just to watch her eyes flash, "are you ready for more?"

The thigh he's slipped between hers is getting wet as she rubs herself against it, but she's determined to put up a good fight, evidently. Were he a lesser man, he might be confused by the ice in her voice when he's feeling the heat of her core. "You can call me Lancelot, and yes, I am."

"Good girl," he says, then rocks his thigh up and swallows her gasp. She's about as experienced with kissing as she is with the rest — how such a beautiful girl can have had no-one ready to kiss her for hours on end is beyond his comprehension — and he spends long moments keeping up the pressure against her cunt whilst coaching her, slowly, on how to lick desire into someone's mouth. She catches on, enough that he feels his prick start to rise, but wriggles, dissatisfied.

"I said _rough_," she insists, and if she thinks she's ready to run when she can barely find her footing, he's not going to stop her. He lets her think she's won her point, relaxing his grip so that she can push him onto his back and get on top of him; this is how they were positioned when they finished their fight this morning, and she's already breathing more easily once she's not forced to remember how vulnerable she is in a bed, _his_ bed.

"I heard you, _Lancelot_," he snaps back, surging up and twisting her so she's on her belly. He presses down on the small of her back with one hand, the fingers of the other — already accustomed to sticky wetness — finding her cunt again, sinking deep into the tight heat.

* * *

"Darlin', you'll wear your eyes out, reading till all hours," he hears as Eggsy wraps strong arms around him from behind as firmly as if the low chair back weren't keeping their hips separate. "Come on, up you get."

It is later than he meant to work, nearly the time when his alarm will go off; it looks like he won't be seeing his bed for hours yet. "I'm up, I'm up," he reassures the lad who's pressing the warm crown of his head to the nape of Merlin's neck, hot breaths easing down Merlin's spine. "I'll shower —"

"Or you wanna run with me?" Eggsy offers, and Merlin swivels in his chair to see his man in a pair of soft, thick jogging shorts in grey heather that makes his thighs look splendid. No, they are splendid all on their own and the shorts are actually detracting from how he can look when he's smiling up at Merlin, utterly enchanting in his joy; still, they cling very nicely to his plush bottom, and Merlin drags his gaze up to find his lad looking more than a little amused. "Or you could just eat me up with your eyes."

"Don't tempt me, lad," he says, feeling utterly secure in Eggsy's love, even when he's been at work all night, is more than likely in need of a wash, and has ignored the forgiving siren in his bed for hours on end. "A run sounds good. Give me three minutes."

Eggsy nods briskly, already starting to stretch, and Merlin decides that if he stays one pace behind his man, he'll have the best view in Britain wherever the lad's path takes them.

*

He's expecting Eggsy to barge into his shower (though the lad just finished his own) because he can hear him tiptoeing around the bedroom, quietly unzipping the duffel he's been living out of, but after only a few moments the footsteps retreat. Curious, he emerges from the tiny stall, briskly rubbing himself dry before knotting the bath sheet around his hips. Eggsy's made the bed (that's what the rustling was) and put a gift for him on top of the swell of his pillow: a pair of socks, the same grey as Eggsy's little shorts, with the digits of pi printed in charcoal and rust. They are new but have already been laundered; Eggsy knows he won't wear anything store-bought without running it through the wash once.

Merlin's incapable of resisting, and doesn't try. He pads down the hall, toes pleasantly warm, and finds Eggsy producing two of his favourite sounds: scraping butter onto triangles of toast, and singing. _Put your loving hand out darlin'_ is an order Merlin is happy to obey when that sweet voice issues it, and he's got Eggsy in his arms, nose buried in his lad's damp and fragrant hair. Eggsy twists and turns his head enough to catch their mouths together briefly but keeps making their breakfast.

He's always had the virtue (the parent of all the others, or so the Sisters told him from the time he was just a wee one) of gratitude, and right now his heart is so thankful to have Eggsy that it feels like it's overflowing. He bends low enough to kiss the backs of Eggsy's ears, to nose at his soft nape. That his feelings are not spurned seems to him miraculous enough, but to have them returned _and_ for Eggsy to be so evidently happy with him is beyond his reckoning, divinity or no. "Eggsy lad," he says, revelling in the pleased little murmurs he's eliciting, "I have a question to put to you."

"Yeah, what's that, guv?" Eggsy says, swivelling to one side to sit at the table and gesturing that he should do the same.

"There hasn't really been time to give you and Lancelot a proper introduction to all that you're entitled to as knights," he begins, spooning a bit of lime marmalade onto his first slice of toast. Eggsy, mouth already full with his first slice, just grins at him. "And I know you've been fretting over your mum and sister rather than yourself. But you do have options for housing yourself in London —"

"Rox's service flat's gotta be costing her the earth."

"Kingsman's housing allowance will cover even that, though I believe she's paying out of her own pocket temporarily."

"Must be nice," Eggsy says, reaching for his next piece of toast. "Wait, I suddenly got that much cash to throw around?"

"Yes, but I was hoping you might consider saving it for your sister." Eggsy, slathering heaps of marmalade on his toast, doesn't appear to be catching his meaning. "I have some saved up," he continues, gesturing at the spartan flat that costs but a small fraction of what he's entitled to but Eggsy's eyes stay on his laden toast. "There are alternatives," he tries again.

"They'd let me stay at the manor and put my housing allowance toward a trust or something for Daisy?" Eggsy asks.

"No. Yes. I don't know. I'm trying to ask if you would want to look for a flat with me," Merlin says, then buries his face in his mug of tea. It's made exactly how he likes it, and the perfection of it makes him ask himself what right he has to lay claim to this domestic-minded, large-hearted lad.

"Fuck. Off," Eggsy breathes, and when Merlin dares to look up, he's wearing a smile like a sunrise. "A place for just us?"

"That was my hope," he says, too shocked this is working to consider that they still have no time to go flat-hunting. 

It doesn't seem to be occurring to Eggsy either. "Aces, love." He crams the last of his toast into his mouth and starts clearing the table, holding the spoon out for Merlin to lick clean and then bending to steal a taste from Merlin's lips. "We gotta get moving, meeting starts in an hour."

Eggsy is so good about living up to Kingsman's lofty ideals that it's always a (delightful) shock to remember that he hasn't yet started to obey the letter as well as the spirit of the law; his clothes tend to the comfortable and worn rather than the structured and formal, and that just means Merlin's hands have more freedom to wander beneath them. All he does now, cognisant of the time, is rest his fingertips on the dimples at Eggsy's waist while his thumbs stroke the flesh next to his belly button. Eggsy's startled inhalation reminds him that the lad tastes as good as he feels, and so he buries his face in that belly, wallowing in soap-scented skin and letting his lips catch on warmly pliant flesh.

Eggsy's hands are full, but the words Merlin hears are as good as being held tightly. "Soon I'll get you all to myself," Eggsy says, and the words resound with satisfaction.

*

If ever a mission were designed to shine a spotlight on all of Harry's many charms, Merlin thinks, it's this one. He tries, desperately, to hold onto the happiness of an hour ago, before Eggsy saw Harry's casual assumption of command and the willing obeisance of Kay, from whom Galahad (without a hair out of place) will wrest power in the small cabal he's been building in Milan. Eggsy smiles at Harry (and at Sagramore and Tristan, who have equal responsibility with Galahad, as they will all do the same work, just in different areas of the ravaged world) and joins in the brainstorming to ensure that nothing is overlooked before the knights are in the field, but only lights up when he gets a chance to speak privately with Lancelot.

Roxy has a very good poker face, but Merlin's the one who trained her and he can read her without much difficulty, even when he can't hear her words. The look on her face is indicative of some recent disappointment (romantic, most likely, as every other piece of her life has clicked satisfactorily into place with her becoming Lancelot, eleventh of that name) that she is trying her level best to get past. There is nothing to limit the object of Lancelot's unrequited affections to the men in this room (if she even goes for men), but Merlin reasons that she's seen virtually no-one else for the past year, since she became a candidate. His mind leaps first to Harry, the most likely culprit, but it was Eggsy who waxed rhapsodic over his mentor and Roxy who merely listened to those litanies of praise. Unless it is that she won't try for Harry for fear of hurting her friend? Even as he watches, she looks over at Harry, and if that is a look of love, Merlin will eat his own eyebrows.

It cannot be her mentor, now Arthur; there is a nearly familial easiness between John and Roxy, and Merlin remembers that the former Lancelot was not just her uncle but also had a cousin in common with John. She might well have grown up knowing John, but all signs indicate that she never fantasised about him.

Sagramore, Kay, Geraint, and Tristan have all been working outside England for the duration of her candidacy and knighthood. She would never have known the other knights, who showed their true colours when he set off the explosives in their heads. The answer is literally staring him in the face: it's Eggsy.

Merlin catches himself then. What is he doing, rummaging through people's private thoughts, watching Eggsy as if he doesn't know that the lad is trustworthy? His natural tendencies to analyse situations minutely and believe only in what he's personally proved to be true are fighting against his desire to lay himself bare for Eggsy. Eggsy, who deserves a partner as generous with his heart and time and attention as he's been with his own.

It doesn't matter, he decides, why Eggsy, who could have had Harry Hart or Roxy Morton in his bed, chose him instead; all that matters is that he did, he does, keeps making that choice, and now it's up to Merlin to live up to it. As if he can feel Merlin's gaze, Eggsy looks over and winks at him, then nods in response to Roxy, who's whispering urgently in his ear. Merlin just looks back at him, heat in his eyes, and Eggsy takes that heat and turns it to light with his smile.

*

"Rox figured me out right quick," Eggsy says, panting, as they get in their own way, kissing insistently when they should just concentrate on getting out of their clothes. "Said everyone and their mother coulda twigged it, the way I was beamin' at you." He sounds pleased about his own transparency, and Merlin will kick himself later for having doubted the lad at all; right now, he just needs his hands on his man.

Eggsy's wearing a suit, midnight blue, darker than the navy he'd worn to clear out Valentine's bunker (from which flattened bullets had later fallen like a shower of coins, and Merlin had felt a heart-deep pang for each that he might have lost Eggsy to, had it been aimed at his unprotected skull). That three-piece suit, Merlin is certain, is the pinnacle of the sartorial art, so closely fitted that it both cradles Eggsy's flesh and acts as a second, more protective skin. It flatters his colouring and makes him look like the dream of some particularly benevolent deity. It's the first one Eggsy had a hand in designing, and Merlin is just about ready to rip it to shreds to get it off him.

Instead he slips his fingers into the tight spaces between fabric and skin, pulling the former taut to ease free the fastenings while enjoying the warmth of his beloved's body. Eggsy ought to be helping, but instead is lolling, head on Merlin's shoulder and feet tangling with his own. Something (he's not sure yet what) has flipped a switch, so that Eggsy has gone pliant and trusting and Merlin is completely in control. "Sweetheart," he says, and Eggsy hums like he's fuzzy with sleep. "Darling," he tries, and Eggsy shuffles, all animal instinct, to put his mouth on Merlin's neck.

He's managing with the trousers and braces and pants, is capable of unbuttoning midnight waistcoat and lavender shirt, can even unknot the silken length of the lad's tie, but it is the star-sapphire cufflinks that defeat him. "Eggsy lad, help me," he says, and Eggsy's eyelashes flutter but the words do not break the spell. "Very well," he says, opening Eggsy's rosy mouth with a proper kiss, sucking down all the sweetness on offer, "to bed." He gathers his lad up in his arms, Eggsy's forearms curving over and around his skull, and walks toward the bedroom. He's able, by switching which arm is cradling Eggsy's bottom, to untie the lad's polished oxfords and let gravity take them, shining pebbles left in their wake along with his own brogues.

He sets Eggsy down on the bed and puts his body between those spread legs, fingers flying to strip off his own clothes; Eggsy squeezes his magnificent thighs around Merlin's and trails his fingertips along the ridges of his own abdominal muscles. Eggsy's cock is leaving sticky trails along their thighs, and Merlin finally frees himself of the last of his clothing and tugs once more at Eggsy's shirt, which pulls taut at the wrists, trapping them at the small of the lad's back. Merlin sits up against his headboard, pulling Eggsy over him. Eggsy's shirt is tight around the wrists but fully parted in the front and revealing his skin, which looks like it was just made to bear Merlin's fingerprints. He holds his lad closer and with infinite care and patience gets him situated on his cock.

With Eggsy's hands trapped behind him, Merlin has for once not been deprived of his glasses and he can see every lovely detail. The lad's whimpering purrs are the perfect soundtrack to the unhurried insistence of their rocking hips, the twisted circles they are making keeping them close to ecstasy. Merlin tucks his hands into Eggsy's, lacing their fingers together, and despite how close their faces are, their relentless movements are too slow to make his glasses fog up; he sees Eggsy's lovely mouth tremble as he comes, spunk shooting straight up Merlin's belly only to be ground away by their next inexorable roll.

Eggsy tips forward with a satisfied exhalation, his temple against Merlin's clavicle as if he's trying to hear the thunderous beating of Merlin's heart. When Merlin comes, Eggsy soaks it all up and bites down on the bone.

Merlin begins peeling them apart (at last able to apply enough concentration to get those cufflinks unfastened and the ruinously crumpled shirt off), each movement as leisurely as the sex itself, unthreading the complicated tangle of limbs and ending with Eggsy's back up against his chest, the lad's head tipped back against his shoulder. Eggsy looks blissed out, so Merlin contents himself with a rough, quick kiss to the temple and some thorough strokes through the softness of his hair, but then he hears the lad laugh. "Nice socks, darlin'," Eggsy murmurs, and Merlin wiggles his toes, making every midnight-blue octopus look like it's dancing.

* * *

Arthur's meeting of all Kingsmen currently in the UK provides a convenient excuse to moon over Merlin, who is there, of course, because to try to plan a mission without his practical omniscience would be the rankest folly, and John is far more willing to acknowledge all that Merlin brings to the Table than Chester Fucking King ever was. Merlin smiles more these days, Harry has noticed, and he is tempted to think it's due to the fact that he's got his best friend back, fighting fit. Likely that has some share in it, but there's no denying that the new regime, much more welcoming of the team Merlin's spent years building, must play a role as well.

The congregation of Kingsmen — they need a collective name, something along the lines of _a murder of crows_ — offers not only an occasion for yearning but also a trip down memory lane. He's had nearly every knight present in his bed, some on multiple occasions because if once was a pleasure then twice was a marvel and there's no such thing as too much, and he finds himself considering Lancelot. She's dressed in a proper Kingsman suit, medium grey with a bold burgundy tie, though she looks far different from every other knight, even Eggsy, who's stunning in a beautifully cut suit he's never seen before. Roxanne wears her togs with utter confidence, as if anyone who would object to a lady kitted out thus is woefully behind the times; the green girl he'd surprised into volcanic pleasure is nowhere to be found.

If she's so adept at concealment, perhaps it is she who should be on his arm for his upcoming mission in Milan, rather than Eggsy, whose face is still laughably readable. The two youngest knights are whispering together, he looking very pleased and she appearing half-scandalised and half-envious, and they both dart glances his way.

Eggsy's eyes slide away in an instant, but Roxanne's linger on him, considering. Harry wonders if she is pondering how well they might work together. He suggests it before she can — she has no qualms about speaking up, that much she's amply demonstrated — once Arthur opens the floor. And after all, Sagramore will be taking an agent from the South African office to Johannesburg; Tristan is seconding one of Merlin's British Indian minions, Beatrice, he thinks he's heard her called, for his meeting in Mumbai; and Geraint can do as he likes as long as his New York accent remains up to snuff. There is no reason for him not to be allowed to request Lancelot, and he's pleased that the notion is taken seriously enough to be batted around before being approved. He doesn't miss that Arthur's eyes are fixed unblinkingly on him, but it's by John's own rules that the majority carries the motion.

Odd, that once the meeting is adjourned, he cannot find Merlin to hear his opinion — their wizard is evidently not yet used to being encouraged to speak up during these meetings, as Chester cast a long and terrible shadow — or Eggsy, who must be licking his wounds at not being paired with his former mentor, but he thinks he knows where he will find Roxanne, once he's done a bit of socialising with the old cadre of knights.

*

He is aware that his mood has soured considerably by the time he finds her — in the library, as expected, brushing up on her Italian — but he refuses to acknowledge the reason for it when he has such a beautiful diversion in front of him. What does it matter if no other knight looks at him, angling for an invitation to his bed, now that he is so hideously scarred? Even the men who'd once begged for the privilege of being taken apart by him are now treating him like a eunuch, as if it were his manhood rather than a single eye that has been stolen from him.

Roxanne does none of that — after all, she has direct and bruising proof that his virility is undiminished — but she does treat him to a look like she's got him pinned on a dissection table. "What is your plan?" she asks.

"Must I have a plan, my dear? We've not even been properly briefed." That's not quite true; Arthur's words about the new endgame of Kingsman missions are more than enough of a hint as to how he's expected to work. Though she did not hear the first version of that speech in his room in Medical, she did get the reprise at today's meeting, and Lancelot is technically his equal, all knights having gone through the same rigorous testing; he is perfectly within his rights to turn it around against her. "What of you? Have you formulated some plan to ensure the continuity of civilisation in southern Europe?"

"Is _that_ what you're doing?" she asks, undaunted despite his looming.

"Of course," he says, surprised by her tone.

"I couldn't help noticing that the strategy is to put powerful men in hotspots to seize control and then establish the new world order, and that much younger women, myself included, are to be on those men's arms. Not to contribute, mind, but to demonstrate that the men have things well in hand in their own lives and therefore ought to be trusted to do the same on a grander scale." She sounds like a nanny or a headmistress, ever icier as she gets more enraged, and her diction gets even more clipped. "Or as a show that little has changed, that young women are a commodity and that their possession can be transferred as the wind changes and power shifts."

He cannot tell if it is her anger or the burgundy length of her tie that makes her eyes look like drops of amber, burning in her face. He very much likes the look of her at this precise moment.

"Well?" she snaps.

"We can only send the soldiers we have," he says, noting from the erasure of one of her frown lines that she is somewhat soothed by the military term and the implication that they are of equal rank; he is not a general sending canon fodder off to unmarked graves, but as much a foot soldier as she is. "This is Kingsman, the organisation you fought to join, and this is the world in which we live."

_Mollified_ is not the correct term, but she does subside a little. "Very well. What do you need me to do?"

"Nothing demanding your halting Italian," he says, nodding at the books on the table, but she makes no move to put them away. Seeing her lips tighten, he bends down to get his mouth near her ear. "My dear," he says, "what would you have me do?"

He's close enough to feel her inhalation upon hearing the endearment. "Trust me," she says. "We can build the world better this time."

"Meaning?" Any new world must be either a continuation or a repudiation of the old world, and in any case it will still be a _reaction_ to the order she's railing against. Nevertheless, he is curious, not to say flattered that she is entrusting him with her ideas.

"Meaning I won't be passed around amongst the men hammering out the future, not even from Kay to you; you can find some other shorthand for taking control from him. I'll be only yours." He draws a finger up the soft length of her neck, surprised when she gets her hand flat on his hip and pushes him away. "And you'll be mine." There is something like triumph in her eyes when she looks up at him. The need to assert that _she_ is _his_ conquest immediately heats his blood, and from the look on her face, she can read him like a book. "Go," she says, turning her attention back to the language-acquisition guides.

"Is that what you want, Dite?" he asks, dropping his pitch to the lower register that had got her squirming in his bed.

It's less effective, evidently, when he's not already wrung an orgasm or three out of her, though not entirely useless; she shifts restlessly in her chair and says in a voice that's not quite as dismissive as she thinks it is, "What I want is to go home having mastered the basics of Italian, take a bath, and then sleep for hours. _What_ part of that, precisely, could you help with?"

"All of it," he says, taking her mouth in a firm kiss that silences her.

*

There is an art to undressing a Kingsman, and Harry is a master. He's pleased that Roxanne's suit, while cut differently, proves to be just the same in the handling of it. He's tempted to leave her tie on, just for the spark the coloured sheen of it lends her eyes, but the thought of anything touching her other than him is not appealing. He is quick and she is impatient and very soon she is in his arms, not a stitch on either of them.

Her bed is large and smothered in pillows that he clears with a sweep of his arm before tossing her down. The splay of her legs is inexpressibly alluring, and he puts his mouth on her sex without prelude. It's been ages since he's done this, and he bloody well relishes it. He eats her out relentlessly, unmindful of the painful tugs to his hair, the pressure against his nose and chin, the rise of her voice's volume and pitch, the rush of wetness that floods his mouth. Her thighs are quivering as if he's touched her with a live wire instead of his tongue. He only pulls away when her heel lands on his collarbone and pushes. The drag of his cock on her duvet informs him that he's gone stiff as a poker and that he needs to bury himself in that wet warmth where he was just labouring.

She doesn't want his mouth anymore but she appears willing to entertain his fingers, so long as he keeps them gentler and more playful. He coats them in her slick and paints her nipples, dips back into the well to spread the wetness across her lips, open on a gasp. She does her best to pull him up by his hair, but he won't be hauled around like a sack of potatoes; she whimpers when he resists, so he takes pity and crawls up her body to give her his mouth.

Roxanne relishes the taste of herself, evidently, and he lets her have it while he stretches her with questing fingers. "Harry," she says finally, thighs locked around his wrist, and he bites, without particular gentleness, at her pretty mouth. 

"Dite," he says, "open up." She looks up at him, so clearly trying to get her recalcitrant limbs to obey that he eases her way, putting his hips between her legs to keep her spread. His cock catches, the angle not quite right until he throws one of her legs over his shoulder, and then he can push in, heavy and firm and victorious. God, he is glorying in this, her capitulation, yes, but even more that insistent clinging heat around his cock and the sounds — the sighs rippling through her body, the squelch of her dripping cunt — of her surrender.

He withdraws and plunges in again, and she somehow exerts the right muscles to roll them over so that she is astride his hips. Harry can do very well in this position, and he resolves to show her, thrusting up with a force that would unseat anyone but a Kingsman. She bares her teeth at him, very clearly taking her triumphs wherever she can get them, and he is frankly enjoying himself too much to protest.

*

He wanders round her flat at his leisure while she's in her bath. The place is surprisingly anonymous, all tastefully done in shades of sand and gold with coral and cream accents, and says absolutely nothing about her. There are no framed photographs anywhere — that particular decorative touch seems to have gone the way of the dodo with this digital-obsessed generation — and all that graces the walls are the kind of paintings meant to look like they could be famous Impressionists' minor works. Only the frogs — the prevalence of which constitutes a motif, if not a mania — in the form of fridge magnets and tiny figurines and coasters confirm that this flat belongs to Roxanne and not some other young, successful person who spends so little time at home that she cannot be bothered to personalise the space where she lays her head.

He plucks up one of the small ceramic frogs, painted quite a soothing green with vivid orange feet and eyes, and discovers the ledge it was sitting on conceals Roxanne's dry bar, stocked with good whisky and a pair of satisfyingly heavy crystal tumblers. He pours himself a decent amount — the taste is the one he misses the most whenever he is locked away in Medical — and returns to the en suite, where Roxanne is still reclining in the bath he drew her.

She looks limp with satisfaction, but her eyes are glittering with awareness that their contest is by no means over. Her tub is not nearly big enough for them both but he stands by it and holds his glass to her lips for her to take a sip; the loose knot in which she's piled her hair on her head wobbles alarmingly when she moves. Through the sheen of floral bath oil clouding the water, her body shines pink where it is not darkened by the bruises he left when he finally gave her the rough treatment she'd begged for without understanding the reality of her request. Somehow the varicoloured skin only enhances the likeness to that painted Aphrodite, and he had never thought that he would share anything — least of all taste in women — with his father other than a surname.

The long scratch she left on his backside pulls a little as he straightens back up and he smiles down at her though she's closed her eyes once more.

* * *

Eggsy takes Arthur's gift of two days completely off (whilst Geraint assiduously courts the companies and families that power a resolutely unchastened New York) and visits his mum and sister. Merlin couldn't take the days off himself, not with so many missions gearing up, and is touched beyond measure that Eggsy wears his glasses the entire time, sharing his family as if it costs him nothing. Michelle seems to accept fairly quickly that her son might have needed corrective lenses long ago (and definitely in the present, when his work as a tailor depends on the fineness of his stitches) but only now has the funds to get them, and Daisy and JB love Eggsy unreservedly, in whatever shape they can get him.

It is lovely to see his lad frolicking with his sister on a sunny hillside, his ready laughter spurring her own as they marvel at JB's antics and revel in their own delight in having not a care in the world; Merlin takes note of how happily Daisy looks up at clouds and branches overhead and resolves to make her a kite (duck-shaped, perhaps? or maybe just painted with a duck or two) to sail along the wind one fine day.

It is even better to see the pair of them the next day, which has dawned a pearly grey that promises rain. Eggsy has her on his hip and they look out the window into the soft morning light.

"Why no sun?" Daisy wants to know.

"Cause it's time for rain, ducks," Eggsy tells her, smoothing her curls away from her little face.

"Ezzy make sun." She looks at him, but Merlin, looking out of Eggsy's glasses, can see only her face, not his lad's. She is evidently in earnest, trying to get her brother to understand. "Ezzy do _anyfing_."

Eggsy kisses her head, setting her curls into disarray again. "But I picked rain for today so's I could cuddle you close, Daisy-girl. Ain't it nice an' warm inside like this?"

Daisy's face lights up, and he can see her throw her arms around Eggsy's neck with fervour, wriggling close and making yummy-yummy noises that should be incongruous but are not. "Cuddle!" she crows; the word does not sound quite right (her speech has suffered from Dean Baker's poisonous miasma) but the joy in it is unmistakable.

"I love you, my sweetheart, my bonny lad," Merlin says, softly enough that Daisy won't hear and be confused, and from the way the lenses move (Eggsy's smile is evidently enough to shift the glasses), Merlin knows that the words were heard.

*

"Tell me something I don't know about you," Eggsy invites the moment Merlin signals that he can take a quick break; the quantity of work that needs to be done before these virtually simultaneous missions at the four corners of the globe is staggering, but he's getting through it methodically, with the help of his team, and with occasional flashes of inspiration from the lad who owns his heart.

If he's only got ten minutes before Bea shows up, more nervous about acting as Tristan's brainless arm candy than she was to direct the knight through the cracking of various ciphers while fire raged around him, now's not the time to get into anything serious. He falls back on something Sister Margaret told him once, when he went to help her with the new babies, so frail and in need of the comfort of a warm embrace. "My toes were webbed when I was a wee one. I had surgery before I even began walking to correct the syndactyly."

"You musta been an ace swimmer," Eggsy says, and the lad's deadpan is a thing of absolute beauty.

"Tell _me_ something," he says, now that he's thinking of it. "What is behind all the frogs you buy Roxanne?" The ducks for Daisy he understands, but the amphibians pass all comprehension.

"She just thinks they're cute, is all. Or, no, 'so ugly they're cute' is what she actually said. And I like makin' her smile. She's a top girl, Rox." Behind his glasses, Eggsy's eyes are fixed on his own reflection in the bullet-train window, and Merlin knows that's for his benefit, so he can feel like they're looking at each other.

It will help nothing to articulate his suspicions that Roxy would have liked to have Eggsy's sexual prowess as her main reason to smile, so he keeps silent on that point. "That she is. Are you heading off to the shop to be kitted out for New York?"

"Aye," Eggsy says gravely, such a dead-on mimic that Merlin can do nothing but laugh. Eggsy's reflection grins (cheeky and certain of being loved) and Merlin cannot stop himself from smiling back though the lad cannot see him. Eggsy whistles through his teeth as he ascends in the small lift that was once a rather grand dumbwaiter, eyeing the dimensions like he's trying to figure out whether two pairs of Kingsman shoulders can fit at the same time, and makes his way to the front of the shop to dawdle at the counter until the head tailor is ready for him.

"Percival, right this way," Jeremy says, gesturing to Eggsy, and Merlin (though he does enjoy the sight of Eggsy disrobing very much and that of him putting on bespoke gear only slightly less) is about to sign off and get back to his work when Harry walks in. "Galahad!" Jeremy calls. "Perfect timing. I can take you both now."

Both knights seem surprised but amenable, and they file through the doors of Fitting Room One where Harry, creature of habit that he is, makes a beeline for the whisky. "Matching suits, gentlemen, for mentor and protégé," Jeremy says, hanging one up and laying the other (Eggsy's, Merlin can tell just from the proportions of it) over his arm to display it.

"Very good," Harry says between sips. "Give us fifteen minutes?" Jeremy, dutiful like all the support staff, discreetly exits, and Merlin is watching his two favourite people in one room, neither of whom knows just how much the other means to him.

"It's alright that we match, right, cause we won't be in the same place?" Eggsy asks. "Otherwise we'd just look barmy."

Harry's eyebrows go up and stay up while Eggsy takes the opportunity to divest himself of his clothes, pants and all. "Did you want to speak to me about that?"

"Nah, Rox'll be great. It's why you asked for her," Eggsy says, and even Merlin can detect no hurt in his voice. "Sides, I get a trip to New York out of the deal. Gonna eat my weight in pizza."

"Which you also could have done _in Italy_," Harry points out in a tone Merlin knows very well; Harry's trying not to be charmed by the nonsense Eggsy's spinning. Or by Eggsy's bared body (Merlin splits his screen between the camera positioned at the top of the mirror that dominates the room and Eggsy's glasses, and notes how Harry's piratical gaze drags slowly up the length of the lad).

"In front of my mentor?" Eggsy says, at last sounding scandalised. "Will I fuck." Eggsy's bright head shakes vigorously. "You gonna tell me the secret to these pants?" he asks, waving the Kingsman underwear around like a flag. "Cause last time they just about roasted my bollocks."

"There's always a price to be paid, dear boy," Harry says, voice slipping into a lecherous register just from the sight of Eggsy naked, and Merlin wants so badly to make his claim known. "They run warm because of the tight weave, which makes them blade-resistant. So if you prize what you keep in them, you'll wear them with a smile. As I do." With that, Harry sets down his glass, removes his clothing, and strides past Eggsy wearing only his crimson silk eyepatch.

Eggsy goes a little pink, but does nothing but slip on his pants and then, carefully, each sock (garters and all) and trousers. His concentration is evident in his silence, because usually Eggsy hums or whistles as he dresses; now he is clearly thinking where each of his weapons will sit and appreciating how the tailoring is so exquisite that the lines of his silhouette will be unbroken by knives and firearms. He only turns when Harry, still undressed, presses the concealed button next to one of the mirrors. "Merlin," Harry says, lounging casually in that way he has that makes his legs look miles long.

"Oh, he's busy, said he could only take a quick break," Eggsy says, and Merlin realises that Eggsy has no idea he's still watching, still able to see his best friend and his beloved.

Eggsy, at the trifold mirror, cannot see his own bare back, but Harry can, and too late Merlin remembers that he'd pressed insistent kisses on Eggsy's broad back, some with teeth that nibbled at soft skin. Of all the people on earth, Harry is the one who will be able to read those marks. The moment he does, his spine goes very straight and rigid and he pushes away from the wall, ready to launch himself forward. Eggsy, unaware, buttons his braces and reaches for his shirt.

Even with so much experience of all Harry's many moods and attitudes, Merlin cannot guess what is coming. His work is forgotten; Bea, whenever she finally shows up, will have to drag him away from his screen. Harry will not _hurt_ Eggsy but he has never been particularly tender either, as their last fight proved (Harry, en route to Kentucky, admitting privately to him that he'd gone past giving Eggsy the rough side of his tongue; what he'd done was more akin to a verbal flaying). Eggsy should not have to defend his right to love Merlin, nor have Harry, to whom he's always looked up, cast doubts on the sincerity of Merlin's love for him.

"Merlin," Harry begins in a hard and carrying voice, but pauses when Eggsy's guileless eyes meet his in one section of the mirror. "Merlin is very dear to me," Harry says, more softly, "and I trust to you as well."

"Ain't no-one better," Eggsy says, smiling at Harry. "But if you have to give me the shovel talk, can you put some pants on first?"

That's enough to startle a laugh out of Harry, who obliges and then says, "I'd wager you don't know the half of it. Merlin, first of that honoured name, is the unsung hero of this place."

"He ain't unsung in the Unwin house," Eggsy says, hands compulsively smoothing down his trousers and jacket even though there are not yet weapons to conceal on his body. "He charmed my mum proper, and Daisy's half in love with him."

"So you're telling me there's no need for a 'shovel talk'?" Harry asks, a wry purse to his lips.

"I'm saying, tell me _everything_, Harry." And that's Merlin's cue to go find Bea and leave them to it, because who knows what exaggerations Harry will impress on the lad, when Eggsy is all too ready to believe the best of him.

* * *

Harry, perched on a high stool at the bar of a restaurant with two Michelin stars and sipping a cocktail strong enough to put hair on a nun's chest, feels an unfamiliar sensation in the pit of his stomach. He darts a quick glance down to verify that he hasn't swallowed anything he oughtn't, and to check for any object that could be digging into his belly, but notes nothing untoward. All he sees is the familiar sight of a pin-striped navy suit, and understanding crashes over him with the force of a tidal wave.

He has loved nearly every minute of being a Kingsman, and always believed he has considered the work its own reward. _A necessary field in which he excels_ is how he would have described espionage, and thought no more of it beyond being glad that he escaped the predictable boredoms of his father's petty and useless life. But now, the hollowness inside him is telling him he _was_ looking for a reward all this time: Merlin. He has operated under the assumption — laboured under the _delusion_ — that Merlin would reward his prowess by ending in his bed, a fitting homecoming for them both. Only now Eggsy is there, precluding that desired consummation, and the savour has gone out of the work for him.

What could Eggsy possibly have said to win Merlin? How on earth did that boy think he was going to keep him?

A light hand on his shoulder jolts him out of his maudlin thoughts. Roxanne must be on even more ridiculous heels than she'd worn previously, because she does not have to strain upwards to buss his cheeks, quick though the greeting is. "Giorgio," she says, and watches him unfold his legs from the contortions that allowed him to tuck them under the bar whilst steering clear of hooks and unnecessary adornments.

It takes a little concentration for him to speak in French when he's hearing Italian all around them, but that's the language they agreed on for this mission; she has near-native fluency, and he's no slouch at it, as it's close enough to Italian for him to pass muster. "Good evening, my beauty." She is indeed in heels that look like toothpicks, but the twinkling lights are doing wonderful things to her face and figure. The aquamarine of her coloured contacts is jarring — he's used by now to seeing deep brown, darker even than his own, staring back at him — and enough to change her from familiar to alien.

"Signor, signorina," a waiter murmurs, and Harry follows Roxy to their table, watching her skimpy peach-coloured frock float around her, its ruffles undulating as she walks. There is a hesitation in her gait, something beyond the discomfort of those preposterous shoes, that he needs to investigate. If she has injured herself somehow in the days since he last saw her back in London, whilst she's been off associating with the young beauties and socialites who survived V-Day unscathed — in an arena that should have been safe as houses — their joint mission might be endangered.

Sitting opposite him in that frock right out of a Fragonard canvas, with her eyes demurely down and a sparkly gloss on her mouth that makes her look like nothing has ever touched her lips but champagne, she looks exactly as she ought, as any spies around them would expect the . . . playmate . . . of a man like Giorgio Rossi to appear. How could she have been so careless as to allow herself to be injured?

_Under the weather_, he thinks after two delicious courses have gone by and she's only picked at them, _not injured_. Her preference for small and perfect bites — for tiny vol-au-vents, for miniature skewers of meat and cheese, for champagne truffles — notwithstanding, she needs to eat a proper meal if she's not to be up all night with an empty stomach and an aching head. His own plate is a wasteland of tiny bones and citrus peel while hers still bears a beautiful red mullet dressed with lemon, capers, and spiced honey. He waits until the waiter, confused by her diffidence, at last approaches. "Ma chère," he begins, clocks that the man recognises that they're conversing in French, and picks up her hand to kiss it, conveying that there is no trouble between them. It is impossible to tell who might take an interest in them; best to keep up their act at all times.

There is no harm in putting on a show of pampering her, as anyone who goes after her thinking she's his weakness will find themselves swiftly outmatched — even when a knight is unwell, Kingsman training tells — and he nods approvingly at the waiter who has anticipated his actions and put both servings of their lemon risotto on a single plate. "Chérie," he murmurs, holding a bite, fragrant with rosemary, to her lips. Those alien blue eyes meet his squarely, and then she ducks her head to take the mouthful between her glossy lips. He steals a bite for each one he feeds her, satisfied at last that she's taking in some calories. Their waiter appears to find the pair of them charming, abetting him by bringing out only one laden plate each of the lamb and the salad. Roxanne eats so uncomplainingly that he wonders if her earlier hesitation was part of a plan that he has spoilt, but he is close enough that he would feel the heat of her frustration.

It is not that the waiter finds his tenderness charming, he realises belatedly when the man sets down a towering portion of maraschino strawberries with mascarpone; it is that the man enjoys the sight of Roxanne being fed and doted upon, her pretty mouth opening and her eyes closing in pleasure. Though the dish is a particular favourite of his, he's too intent on watching the berry stains darken her lips further with each bite to steal any for himself. Her mouth is brighter than a berry now, and he leans in close to taste it. She kisses the same in Italy as at home in England, the way he taught her, and he wants her in his bed. Whoever has been monitoring them has made not a peep, so either they've not been watched by anyone other than the waiter or their show has been convincing enough to establish them as lovers without any ulterior motives. He stands, throws down cash, and wraps an arm around Roxanne's waist.

The click of her heels on the marble floor is quick, the sound pleasant to his ears. "Your hotel or mine?" he asks, arm already raised to hail a taxi.

"Both," she says. "You can drop me on your way." This deflection is new; he has got used to her welcoming his attentions. Perhaps it is that she did not like the waiter's covert looks, considered them of a piece with the attitudes she railed against earlier back in the Kingsman library?

"No, we'll go together. We have much to discuss." The infinitive verb is pleasantly sharp in French, none of the sibilance of the English counterpart, and Roxanne has no answer. He keeps a proprietary hand on her knee once they are in the taxi, in case the cabbie glances their way. She knows enough to keep up the appearance of amity but the moment the door to her room shuts out the rest of the world, she is done. "Que se passe-t-il?" he asks, tone caressing the words so it sounds like a tender query from one lover to another, even as he's going through her rather grand room to make sure that no-one has them under surveillance.

"Rien," she says on a sigh, taking up the search on her side of the bedroom, but he finds the answer once he's worked his way into the bathroom and sees that she's got menstrual supplies tucked neatly away with her makeup. "There's, there's nothing," she says in English, appearing in the doorway just as he puts his hand on the bag of tampons. "Oh."

"Oh indeed. Get in," he says, turning on the shower. She is blushing fiercely enough that he remembers how young she is, how pitiful her experience has been. "I'll take care of you. Go on, in." Even as he says it he knows she wants privacy more than anything else, so he simply unzips the pretty frock and steps out of the room that's already growing humid.

He comes back, naked, a few minutes later to find the small room filled with steam and the scent of blood. With her hair plastered to her skull and her eyes closed, slightly hunched over from the pain, she looks appallingly vulnerable. He does not know how her cycle affects her — whether her breasts are unbearably tender, whether her cramps can be mitigated by orgasm — but is certain that hot water can only be to the good. It does not seem fair to ask her to talk when she looks so mortified, so he puts his hands to work. He draws her forward to stand squarely under the spray, letting it pound at her too-tight back, and traces a soft line between her breasts along the centre of her slender form. His fingers circle gently at her cunt, around and around, increasing the pressure without slipping inside, and she does not seem to know how to breathe and blink and rock forward all at once, so they all happen a stutter-step apart and he slips one fingertip inside her. Stroking, sinking further in, and he can feel the thick, gelatinous blood that's better than any artificial lubricant, and she is gasping now.

Roxy has an iron grip on his bicep. "Yesss," she hisses, and he is ready to oblige. His fingers part her readily, and she nearly loses her footing on the slick marble. A pause, then, to turn her around, bend her over, and press his cock into her from behind while he holds her steady with an arm around her waist. His grip is transferring her blood from his skin to hers, though he doubts she's even noticed that she's carrying his fingerprints, given how she is howling at his every thrust. His prick is bloodied like it's a weapon he's been using to core out the heart of her, but she's softening and swaying like a reed in his arms, the relief he's offering too necessary to resist. She leans heavily against him, letting him hold her up.

"Didn't you mind?" she asks, more timidly than he's ever heard her sound, when they are lying in her luxurious bed.

"Do I strike you as a man averse to a little blood?" he asks, fingers idling through her still damp hair. "Did _you_ mind?"

She flushes, just a little. "Evidently not, given my banshee impression."

"I took it for the compliment it was."

She's still biting her lip instead of laughing or forcing him out of her room; evidently there's more on her mind. "I – I think there's a higher chance of conception at this time. I'm not sure. But possibly?" She is speaking directly to his chest as if she's unable to meet his eyes. "Does Kingsman provide any —"

Entertaining as the thought is of Merlin's whiling away his days in a laboratory, compounding an emergency contraceptive, he is too familiar with the thorny question of fertility to keep her in suspense; he's glad he can set her mind at rest immediately. "I can't get you pregnant." Her unsettlingly blue eyes dart up, searching his face. "Vasectomy before I ever became a Kingsman." She is about the same age as the women he was seeking to outwit by nullifying his potential to procreate, and he does not know how to frame it — his disgust at his father's monstrously avid skirt-chasing so soon after he buried his wife, his skin-crawling aversion when some of the women thought one Hart would be as good as the other when it came to bearing a new heir for the old man's fortune — so that she might understand.

He does not need to after all — she falls asleep still clinging to him — and he disengages, eases out of her bed, and makes his way to his own hotel, where he checks in with Hero, who reports that the New York and Johannesburg missions have a jump on his and that all is going swimmingly. It is only when he is lying in his cold hotel bed that the thought occurs: Roxanne's blue contacts could only be the result of Merlin's tireless work on a sighted prosthetic for him, and the absence of her spectacles must mean that the contact lenses themselves function as the glasses do. Merlin must have seen him bending Lancelot in half in the shower and holding her until she fell asleep.

He lies awake for the rest of the night.

*

The sound of his untraceable mobile's ring the next morning is unspeakably reassuring, but Merlin says nothing about what he must have seen through Roxanne's lenses; the call is only to request that he have a candidate ready for the Bedivere trials, which will begin in a month's time. Harry frankly does not know if he himself will be a Kingsman for that long, now that the spark has gone out of the work for him. He wants Merlin — not only the one who got away, but his best friend for thirty years besides — to cuff him upside the head, inform him that he's going nowhere, and _sit_ on him if he can't get Harry to see reason any other way. But Merlin is, for some reason, walking on eggshells around him, and Harry can make neither heads nor tails of that until he realises Eggsy must have told him that their relationship is no longer a secret.

He doesn't think he's ever felt this alone, at least not since becoming a Kingsman; Merlin has been his rock and his guide for so long that he has no idea how to do without him. "Harry!" he hears, as if from a great distance, though the mobile is pressed close against his ear.

"What?"

"Where did you go just now?" Merlin's voice is kind.

He's trying to decide how much to say when he registers the complete silence on the other end of the line. Merlin's not even tapping at his tablet or typing at his desktop; the genius's full attention is his, and Harry cannot help relishing it. "I – I am happy for you," he says, needing to say it before he loses his nerve. "For you and Eggsy." He isn't, not yet, but he'll get there. He sees the allure of each of them but still has no idea what could have drawn them together.

"I thank you," Merlin says formally, and Harry's heart sinks. There's a pause and then Merlin, sounding much more like himself, says, "Sod it, I love him, Harry. We're moving in together as soon as we can find ten consecutive minutes to look for a place."

It hurts to hear, but it's surprisingly not a fatal blow. "I think perhaps my awful neighbours killed each other in the V-Day madness," he volunteers, knowing Merlin will understand his deeper meaning. "Certainly I've not seen hide nor hair of at least three of them since I returned home."

"They could just be lying low. Most people know by now that Valentine caused V-Day, but they don't know if his tech is still out there or what they could be made to do even now. It makes sense that they'd still be wary of being around others." Merlin's thoughtfulness and compassion — though he knows very well how terrible and petty the Forsytes, Blankenshipps, and Howards were — are perversely arousing.

"Why must you spoil my fun?" Harry asks plaintively, and delights in Merlin's warm laugh. "I'd much rather have you and Eggsy as neighbours. I'd even make you a cake to welcome you to the Mews."

"You'd make our moving into the bastion of Torydom that you call home the occasion for the first use of your poor neglected oven? Harry, I'm touched."

"I don't exert myself for just anybody," Harry says, and if his voice is not quite steady as he tries to make his heart stop beating to the rhythm of Merlin's name, Merlin is too kind to mention it.

* * *

Eggsy is in his element in New York, where no-one knows precisely what to make of Geraint's new shadow; he's beautiful enough to be a trophy shag but skilled enough to be a proper partner in his own right. Merlin watches his lad move intuitively in Geraint's wake like that is what he was born to do. Given the level of cool competence Eggsy's displaying, there's a pleasure in simply observing him, enough to counter any dim yearning on Merlin's part that he ought to be in on the action too; he hasn't the training or the muscle memory, fit as he's tried to keep himself, and he can be of far more use tracking the big picture by way of knowing every last detail of every last mission.

Still, it is late by his lights (it's late even in New York, famously the city that never sleeps) and he is having trouble staying as sharp as Geraint and Percival have a right to expect their handler to be. Never mind that he's not sleeping well without a green-eyed beloved in his bed. "Horatio, Mercutio," he calls, and the handlers pop their heads up like meerkats. "The two of you are handling the New York mission until I'm back to relieve you. _Both_ of you. Communicate with each other, but try to stay out of the knights' ears unless it's absolutely necessary."

The pair of them were named well, Horatio nodding obediently and Mercutio sending him off with a cheeky wave and a light, "Sleep well, boss, and no consorting with Queen Mab. We'll all be fine till the morning."

"Aye," he says, too exhausted to control his mouth, splitting open in a yawn that cracks his jaw.

*

"Fuck," he says, feeling his nerves coil like startled snakes in his too-taut and woefully under-rested body.

He checks his feed again, but the information packet that Lysander put together unfortunately does not change no matter how many times he blinks dumbly at his tablet. He'd thought (and is sure Harry must have thought) that the bastard was dead (unwept, unhonoured, and unsung), but true to his perverse nature, Albert Hart had survived V-Day and is currently demonstrating that the occasion made not a single dent in his destructive greed. He's heading up a new band of aristocrats who care not what happens to the world as long as their disproportionate share remains in their clawed hands.

(Merlin has never understood how any man could turn away a son as fine as Harry Hart, but he supposes being this kind of monster would have blinded the man to the worth of Harry's character.)

Fortunately, Harry's just in Milan (ahead only by an hour), and not in Johannesburg or New York. The next small mercy is that "Giorgio Rossi" has not made an official appearance in Kay's circle as of yet, and no handler has reported seeing surveillance other than Kingsman's on Galahad or Lancelot, either together or separately; Harry can be pulled out of Milan without having to write the mission off as a loss, as Kay can either stay on as sole lead or cede half his authority to Lancelot.

Merlin's the only one who was privy to the feed from Roxanne's contact lenses (which he locked down immediately), but he is fairly certain that despite the closeness the two knights have evidently forged she will do as she was trained and stay the course. Whether Harry can do without her is the real question, as Merlin has a niggling suspicion that his oldest friend is in a fair way to falling in love with Roxanne. He's seen such ravenousness in Harry before, of course (Harry's libido seeming to need only the slightest spark to turn into a conflagration), but never before has he seen such tenderness from the man (not only stroking through Roxy's damp hair but quelling her fears that she might have conceived their child).

It's a relief to him (he wants Harry to be as happy as he is with Eggsy, and Roxy is in many ways an extraordinary woman), though in his secret soul he mourns being replaced as the central idol of Harry's heart; he's been spoilt by knowing the most desirable knight in all of Kingsman has wanted him for years, even if Harry has pursued other interests with happy and lecherous abandon. Now is not the time for any confidences or softer emotions, however, as he needs to rouse and arm his friend for a pitched battle with shattering stakes. He dials Harry's secured mobile and tries to gather his thoughts.

*

The rejiggering of all the simultaneous missions has been delegated to Horatio and Mercutio, and Merlin's in his favourite of the laboratories, trying anything and everything he can think of to produce a sighted prosthetic for Harry, who will need every advantage in keeping England out of the clutches of his father and a weak-chinned army of like-minded bigots in only a few days' time. He has designed things as wondrous as bullet-proof umbrellas and biometric signet rings that can electrocute a twenty-stone man, not to mention Roxy's contact lenses (though he wasn't happy with their colour, so alien compared to the warm brown they were replacing); he should be able to do this. But nothing he tries is working, and he's just resolved to set his notes aside and start from scratch when his tablet beeps.

Too early to be Eggsy, he'd have thought, only the lad's sleepy face is taking up most of his screen. Eyes of jade, Eggsy has, the dimness of his hotel room and the screen's own blue light making them seem to glow. "What is it, lad?" He looks well enough.

"You've spoilt me, guv," Eggsy says, wrinkling his nose winsomely. "Can't sleep without you, can I? Course they all think I'm bleary-eyed cause Geraint's spending hours pounding my arse flat. How you doing, love?"

He smiles at the lad illuminated on the screen. "Much the same, though no-one suspects me of having any fun in bed without you." Eggsy's yawn triggers one of his own and he reaches up to remove his glasses and rub at one eye with the heel of his hand. "Harry's being pulled off the Milan mission —"

"What?" Eggsy asks, leaning forward in his anxiety. "He alright? Rox and Kay too?"

"They're all fine, lad. Just that there's a new mission that requires Harry himself, no substitutes, and so we're reassessing. Horatio should be reaching out to Geraint at a decent time." Eggsy relaxes so far at his assurances that he actually sits back, and Merlin replaces his glasses to be able to see his man looking sleepily content, so many miles away. "It's my own work that's the issue now. I can't get any of these damned prosthetics to be fully functional, and I've had _months_ to crack this. I am failing him."

"Guv," Eggsy says sternly, "stop. You ain't failed him once in your life, and if you don't take my word for it I'll call him myself and get him to give you a piece of his mind. You made him a glass eye —"

"Acrylic," he corrects, unable to help himself.

"— acrylic eye that looks bloody well real," Eggsy says smoothly, without a flicker for his rudeness. "Why can't he stop covering it up with those eyepatches he likes swanning round in and wear glasses like the rest of us?" Eggsy says the last bit with the amused affection Merlin thought was solely his personal response to Harry's excesses.

It's so simple an idea that it never once occurred to him (or to Harry either, it must be said), and he can feel excitement pound into him as he turns it over in his overtired mind. "The glasses themselves are a binocular camera, and I can easily reprogram his to feed all the data they collect into his working eye," he says, thinking aloud. "That's brilliant, lad. _You're_ brilliant. My sweetheart." He can make the necessary adjustments within the hour and know that Harry is fully equipped with Kingsman's best.

"Nah," Eggsy says, ducking his head, and one of these days, Merlin is going to have to impress upon the lad how much his own happiness depends on Eggsy's believing the best of himself, "just less exhausted than you. This new mission got something to do with Harry's dad?"

He ought to be beyond surprise at what Eggsy can come up with, but he's too startled to disguise it. "He spoke of him to you?"

"In my twenty-four hours with him," Eggsy says, yawning again. "Talked a lot about you, his mum, my dad, Kingsman in general. Didn't actually say anything about the man, but it was the way he talked around him that made me wonder. This an all-hands-on-deck kinda situation?"

"Harry and Arthur and I are going to have to assess," Merlin says carefully, knowing Eggsy will want to support his former mentor while respecting his king. John and Harry have never been more than cordial, and he does not want to get between them or allow Eggsy to wander into that danger zone.

"Take care of him."

"Take care of yourself, beloved," he says in return, and gets a last look at Eggsy, flushed pink, a dimple popping up in his cheek, before the call is cut.

*

"He's a well-preserved fossil," Harry says heatedly. "I hardly require backup."

Merlin gives silent thanks for John, who's nodding to indicate that he's both heard and dismissed Harry's words. "There are larger implications here than your family tree, Galahad. Your father appears to be leading this contingent of aristocrats who survived not only the setting off of Valentine's implants but also the subsequent culling. They comprise minor branches of notable British families but now they have inherited the main lines' wealth and they do not mean to see it slip out of their hands again. Centuries of grudges were paid off when Merlin flipped that switch."

Harry's eyes (behind his glasses, so that he can become accustomed to them once more) are wide with surprise and locked on Merlin's face, and Merlin remembers that he never quite got round to confessing his own part in the mayhem (_spectacular_) of V-Day. "Meaning what?" Harry snaps.

"Meaning that quelling your father's ambitions will be only one small aspect of your task, and as such you will need a team with you."

"The Milan mission was urgent!" Harry protests. Merlin understands his point, but he's prepared to recall Lancelot, Percival, and Beatrice (all the seconds) from their far-flung missions at Arthur's command.

"This is more so," Arthur says firmly. "We cannot afford to do only part of the job; these people are making our home a worst-case scenario, and unless we can shut them down completely, Britain will be taken as an example for the world. So much of the global population perished in or because of the Valentine rage that we can, with every expectation of success, reasonably allot resources such that every survivor gets a fair share. These outmoded aristocrats want the opposite, to revert to a sort of feudal state. It is imperative that we build a better world, and this is our best chance."

Harry shies away at those words, in a way distinct from the slight flinches he's been making as he's suddenly re-upgraded to binocular vision, and Merlin wonders what echo he's hearing that he startles so. Before he can ask after him, Harry clears his throat and speaks. "You're right, Arthur. If I could have Lancelot and Percival accompanying me and Merlin handling us?"

"Granted," John says, and Merlin types up the orders (plus one to bring Bea back as well) in his tablet for Horatio to implement immediately. "And Harry, I expect you to talk to someone — a professional, preferably, or me, in a pinch — when this is over. None of this will be easy on you, no matter what your feelings for your father."

"Understood. And thank you," Harry says, striding out of Arthur's office before anything else can be said. Merlin looks at John and sees only his own worry and determination reflected back at him.

* * *

Oh, how he'd hoped that the bastard had died — miserably and painfully, preferably ripped apart by the servants he abused — on V-Day and that Merlin was just keeping the news from him in order to surprise him with it on his birthday. It was thoughts of his father that had got him through Kingsman training in the first place, knowing that every day he survived was another day the man suffered the sting of disappointment in his only child.

He'd never said any of this to Merlin, an orphan since birth, whose father never claimed him after his mother, too young, died having him. From what little Merlin's shared, the nuns who raised him had been as kind and nurturing as Harry's mother. How she had married Albert Hart he would never know.

Think, he has to _think_. Doubtless his father thinks he's dead too, as they never established contact in the months after V-Day — or, indeed, spoke with any warmth or regularity since Harry first left home for Eton, after years of nannies that his father inevitably fucked and cast out. How best to stage his return from the dead? What will infuriate his father the most? John, for all his high-mindedness, wasn't wrong — the group heads must be stopped — but at the end of it, Harry will finally get to break his father whilst having absolutely unimpeachable reasons for doing so.

Dangling Lancelot in front of the old man is a cheap shot, but one Harry is willing to make; her beauty is inarguable and having her on his arm will remind his father of all that's denied to men his age. The angrier his father is, the more likely he'll make the mistake they'll be watching for. He'd asked for Eggsy for just this purpose — if he and Roxanne are bait, Percival, ninth of that honoured name, is the one who will be clear-eyed enough to find the cabal's weakness and move efficiently to shut it down.

And Merlin — who'll have to be dead and buried before he stops worrying over Harry — will see that Harry will be just fine, and can get on with his life with Eggsy. Harry lets himself get sidetracked from his lifelong hatred of the man who sired him, thinking instead much pleasanter thoughts. He really ought to do something for the pair of them, Merlin and Eggsy; he is not so rich in friends that he can afford to lose the ones he has, who are better than he deserves.

He has always had plenty of money, though; he'd come into the trust his mother left him when he reached his majority, and his coffers are still brimming. The note from Merlin on his glasses — and that will take some adjustment again, as he remembers well how unsettling he'd found coping with the additional sensory input the first time round, when Merlin had just invented the glasses but was too shy to explain their uses — says that there is a meeting of the cabal, doubling as a shooting party for the Glorious Twelfth, at the Derbyshire estate. That gives him only a day or two to plan. He has some shopping to do.

*

He's not sure what exactly Roxy's been told about any of this, but she shows up at his door looking steadier on her feet than he'd left her in Milan. He leans down to kiss her automatically, and though he's not wearing the damned glasses he still has one working eye, and he cannot miss the surprise on her face before she tips her head up to meet his mouth. At least _her_ eyes are brown again, so no-one outside this room need ever know how instinctive it's become to seek her mouth, the comfort her presence provides. It will help sell their cover, in any case.

"We'll be attending my father's shooting party," he informs her once he's drawn her in and kissed her properly against his front door. "At the estate. You will be my fiancée and Eggsy will be my valet. In aid of the former —" he says, breaking off to open a ring box.

He's doubly certain he chose well when he takes in how dazzled her gaze is. "It's [gorgeous](https://www.neimanmarcus.com/p/alexander-laut-18k-white-gold-pear-cut-paraiba-ring-with-diamonds-size-7-25-prod192130088)," she says, looking up to confirm it's hers, and he takes his cue and slides it on her slender finger; it's a perfect fit. "Too modern to be a family heirloom?" Her tone makes it a question, and he understands how the pieces must be fitting together in her mind — his ring on her finger when she's meeting his father for the first time. He does not bother to say that he hopes devoutly it will be the last time too.

"Correct. I chose it for you, Dite, the colour of seafoam. You'll see in his study the painting that I named you for. Unless he's sunk to his proper level and got rid of it."

She's frowning now. "What does that mean? What is our mission?"

Little as he wants to speak of the fascist who sired him, he must, and he reminds himself that he was on the cusp of breaking his silence on the subject with her less than a week earlier. "My father has never worked, but he made rather a career of bedding younger and younger women after my mother died. Perhaps before then too, but I myself would have been too small a child to understand. He mostly preyed on the helpless, but a few of the more enterprising young ladies sought a closer acquaintance with me, betting that he would acknowledge any child they conceived whilst he was supposedly the sole master of their favours."

There is a look almost of pity on her face that he cannot abide. "Hence your vasectomy?"

He's cruder than he meant to be, simply to dispel the power of her expression. "Yes, but that was more of a last resort. My first line of defence was fucking men exclusively, taking boys — from the domestic staff to the townspeople to classmates — as publicly and inventively as possible, which had the added benefit of forcing him to understand that the heir of his beloved title was queer." It's not the whole truth of his sexuality, but far be it from his father to parse the nature of bisexuality when it was so much easier to be disgusted by his son's dalliances with men.

Roxanne is not flinching from the venom in his voice and he remembers that she knows very well his sexual history within Kingsman and has willingly given herself to him countless times since she won their sparring match. "My mother and brother were not homophobic, but expected me never to put a foot out of line," she says, surprising him. "It was exhausting and I very much wanted to be myself, a Kingsman first, but their disapproval had a way of colouring everything."

"Had?"

"V-Day," she says quietly. "We weren't close, but I never wanted their absence like that."

"This mission might have been bespoke for you, then, Dite," he says, and kisses her again.

*

He is being outfitted by Jeremy — a few new pieces will hardly go amiss — when Roxy strolls into Fitting Room One wearing a short country-check skirt and a pair of leather boots so obviously loved that they have ceased squeaking and instead cling fervently to her delectable legs. Jeremy, on his knees adjusting the hems of the lovely navy-blue eleven-ounce worsted trousers, twists to find out who has invaded this sacred space. "Lancelot," the head tailor says without batting an eye, though all that's missing from her Naughty Schoolgirl outfit is an Alice band, "your special order should be ready within the hour."

"Excellent," she says, smiling at them both, "that should do very nicely." The ring, he notes, glitters magnificently, but nothing can outshine her fresh-faced beauty. His father will choke on it.

She knows as well as he does that the guests must already be arriving at the estate, but they will surely make a bigger splash by interrupting the festivities than they would by being on time and appearing to be just another pair of guests to be chatted up or avoided. Besides, he's been late to most of his missions and they've never suffered before. He salutes her with his glass of whisky.

After his fitting is completed, Roxy requests a bib of sorts for him. "I assure you, my dear, that I've been able to keep from soiling my clothes for many years now," he says. "In any case, this is not the suit I will be wearing for our first foray into the heart of darkness."

"All the better," she says, beckoning him to sit and lean forward. She takes hold of his chin and angles his face until it's entirely within the light and then, unexpectedly, extracts a make-up kit from her handbag. His glasses are pushed up to rest in his hair and a brush sweeps a gentle path over the closed lids of his false eye. "Merlin really did a lovely job on this," she muses, "and there's no point in drawing attention to it."

"Certainly not when we're facing those who should have been torn limb from limb and were improbably, disappointingly spared. There's not likely to be any kind of injury in the whole lot," he says, pleased that their mindset is the same. He sits patiently whilst she works her magic.

"There," she says, "good as new. Now I've still to wait for my gown for the evening. Merlin's looking for you."

Given his cue, he departs. Merlin is easily found, but Harry does not make himself known straight away; he cannot say, even to himself, whether he's lingering to learn what Merlin looks like when he dotes on a lover or if he's selflessly giving Merlin uninterrupted time with Eggsy.

The boy's in a plain black suit, reasonably well fitted but obviously not bespoke, and a white shirt not quite straining at the seams to cover the muscled breadth of his chest. Merlin is looping a silver tie — he approves, that colour will do wonders for Eggsy's eyes — around his boy's neck and tying it in a Grantchester knot whilst Eggsy beams up at him. All that adoration ought to make him feel ill, but Harry feels removed from his own observation, as if split in two: both an objective witness and a beast beset by emotions.

There can be no denying that this is exactly what the boy needs — Harry would argue that Merlin is a panacea, actually, and ought not to be concentrating all the good he can do on one surpassingly lucky person — but looking at Merlin now, at the smile tugging at his lips, at the way he shivers as Eggsy's fingertips stroke gently against the grain of hair on his forearm, Harry wonders if he's seeing why Merlin denied him time and again. Merlin wants to be exclusive, wants to be loved solely — how quickly he and Eggsy decided to cohabitate! — and that was the only token Harry never offered.

He would have, if he'd only thought it all through sooner.

He doubts, though, whether Merlin would have taken him up on it, because it's then that he hears how Merlin farewells his lover before a mission, the verbal talisman he offers. "Mind how you go, lad," he murmurs. Harry hears both the echo across the years — Merlin had told him once that hearing the sisters say those words to him gave him the strength to tackle any new challenge — and the unspoken second half, _and come back to me._

He knocks against the open door and both men are slow to look away from each other and see whose presence the knock heralds. Eggsy grins at him first, a bright gleam in his merry eyes. "Unwin at your service, sir." The boy casts a sidelong glance at Merlin and then his attention is back on Harry. "Do people really still have valets and butlers and all?"

"If you stretch the definition of 'people' to include my father and others of his poisonous ilk, then yes, Eggsy, they do. All you'll need to do is be dressed thus, as I won't require any of a valet's actual services from you. You'll be figuring out how to shut this whole sordid affair down, as I'll be hobnobbing with crashing bores and wishing for a nice cup of hemlock."

"You got it, boss," Eggsy says. "Looking good," he continues, gesturing vaguely at his own eye. Harry nods an acknowledgment for the compliment, and sees, as Eggsy steps forward and the light hits him differently, that his tie is not just silk but shot silk, the alternate hue a jade that is a close match for his eyes. Merlin is formidably sentimental after all, and Harry cannot decide whether he would have chafed at being prized thus or relished the loving attention. It is not, when it comes down to it, for him to know.

"Let's get this show on the road, then. Am I playing your chauffeur too?" The boy rubs his hands together, gleefully anticipating which of the exquisite motors in the vast Kingsman garages he'll be able to test.

Harry rolls his eyes, pleased that the glasses allow the full effect of the gesture to impress itself on the viewer in a way that the eyepatch would not, and says, "Yes, only the best for my fiancée and myself."

Eggsy's evidently taken by surprise — so there _are_ limits to what Merlin divulges to his lover — but he recovers more quickly than Harry guessed he would. He smiles over Eggsy's head at his friend and Merlin is shaking his head at him, fondly chiding him for his dramatics. "Is that Rox? Or Bea? Or a bloke, to make your father keel over even quicker?"

"Lancelot," he answers, and Eggsy nods his approval. As if he were waiting for such a gesture — absurd, he hardly requires the approbation of someone who wasn't even born when he began his tenure as Galahad, seventh of that honoured name — he relaxes and expounds. "She's finalising her evening wear and I need to change into a travelling suit. Where's your luggage?"

"Just there," Eggsy says, pointing with his stubborn chin at a bulging leather bag with all its straps neatly fastened. Harry turns to look, but not before seeing, out of the corner of his eye, Eggsy's little finger brush against Merlin's wide, flat hand and Merlin pounce like a panther and capture that questing finger with his own.

"Good hunting, Galahad," Merlin says, his usual send-off for Harry made doubly clever by the sporting occasion he'll be gate-crashing. "Mind how you go, lad," Merlin says again — it's clearly a personal ritual, fraught with meaning; Harry wonders if the boy even knows — and Eggsy grins, cheeky and more fetching than he has any right to be.

"_You_ mind how I go, darlin'," Eggsy says, and propels Harry forward with a hand at the small of his back.

*

Somehow, Albert Fucking Hart has managed to keep his hair — though it is that ugly yellow that white hair sometimes goes, as if it's rotting — and his height — no stoop disfigures the proud line of his spine. In the moment before his father notices him, Harry observes that much, disappointed. It is a genuine pleasure to note how precipitously the old cunt's face falls when at last he sees his son and heir, alive and well and with a beautiful woman on his arm.

Roxy plays her part exquisitely, adjusting her grip on him so that her ring catches the light and smiling with cool disinterest at his father. "So this is where you grew up," she says, deliberately vacant and inviting a sharp retort.

He answers before his father can. "Nothing so bourgeois as nurturing happened under my father's roof, my dear." Lord, he is enjoying this even more than he'd anticipated. He wants to ravish Roxanne and force the old goat to watch how gorgeously she falls apart for him. "At least not after my mother passed away." Albert's rapacious eyes fall to where Harry's hand rests possessively on Roxy's hip; the cloth of her skirt is thick and warm under his hand and he longs to curl his fingers past the short hem to touch the downy flesh he knows so well. He refrains, if only because it is Lancelot at his side, not Roxy, and he is Galahad, here on a mission to lay low this entire band of disgusting vultures. As if to reward his forbearance, she presses a little closer into him, a comforting warmth at his side.

"Dite, I promised to show you that painting, didn't I?" he says. "Father, do please excuse us for a moment."

"Surely you can wait to explore all the treasures until after you've made the proper introductions?" his father hisses, as if Harry is a child still, to be cowed by an order or a displeased tone. The bastard helps himself to Roxy's free hand and kisses it. "Lord Albert Hart, dear girl. What an ornament you are."

"Roxanne Morton," she says, silkily sliding her fingers from his grasp; Harry understands well enough how his father thinks to know that he will take that slow glide as an invitation even though it was a clear retreat.

"Soon to be Roxanne Hart," Harry says, pitching his voice just loud enough to be heard by the other guests who are ready to seize any excuse to cluster round the one beacon of youthful beauty at this appalling gathering. Again, Roxy acquits herself admirably, her breeding showing in her social polish, the ease with which she makes delightful small talk and decorously accepts the attention of every liver-spotted man in the room.

Albert, displaced from Roxy's side by his own guests, collars Harry aggressively, but Harry's too well trained to allow any manhandling of his person or the enviable results of Jeremy's sartorial labours. They end up facing off in the smaller salon, and Harry's surprised to discover he remembers exactly the slant of late-summer light pouring through the crystalline windows. "You're not planning to marry that girl."

Harry might owe his height to the man, but it's still useful when staring him down. "Am I not?"

"She's got the wrong equipment for you, you shoddy little queer," Albert spits.

"Perhaps I've got the wrong equipment for her as well," Harry says, just to watch his father take offense to the very notion of a beautiful lesbian. It's not likely — Roxy had intimated that all of her past disappointments were male paramours, had she not? — but the yarn is satisfying to spin. "Perhaps this is all a plot to keep our families happy."

"Rubbish," Albert says, though Harry can see that he's already working out how best to show Roxy what she's ostensibly been missing. "You've never given a toss about the Hart line, and if you gave a fiddler's fart for the girl, you'd have asked for your mother's ring."

"You'd never have given it to me," Harry says smartly, though he's shaken a bit. Why _hadn't_ he asked for that band with its thickly clustered diamonds, the one his mother had let catch the sunlight to turn it into rainbows, bright and beautiful and fluttering as butterflies, when he'd been fussy and needed distracting? He knew well enough his father would never have let her be buried with a fortune on her finger; the only shock is that it's apparently still in one piece rather than broken up into smaller trinkets for his father's disposable fucktoys.

"And see it on some rentboy's little finger?"

God, the man is cruel. "Are you in the habit of seeking out rentboys, then?"

"Why are you here? Really, I suppose your mother taught you at the very least to wait for an invitation, so this visit is doubly baffling."

"Surely no invitation is required when visiting one's own home and inheritance," Harry says, smiling like his teeth are knives. "Roxanne's a sportswoman, wanted to celebrate the Glorious Twelfth in style, and I had a notion to show her everything she'll enjoy as soon as I inherit the lot."

Albert looks smug instead of shaken by the last comment. "Don't count me out yet, boy. There's a hell of a lot of living I've left to do."

A tap at the door makes them both turn abruptly. It's only Eggsy, head deferentially down as he says to his shoes, "All the bags are unpacked, sir. Is there anything else I can do for you now?"

"No," he says, keeping his tone unruffled, as if he hadn't been a hair's breadth away from slaying the man at his side. "I'll ring if I need you, Unwin."

The old cunt has not seen Eggsy's face, just the top of his head and the appealing thickness of his lush body, but that limited view is apparently all he needs to begin frothing at the mouth. "Disgraceful. Bringing your boys into my home."

Harry doesn't bother mentioning that home was where he'd found many of them in the first place, the servants being fairly easy pickings, as they had far fewer outlets than the son of the house. "You are mistaken as ever. How good to know some things never change."

*

The smell of sex hangs thickly in the air of his bedroom — despite the constant turnover in domestic staff, some institutional memory evidently has been passed down, and he's staying in the very room he left behind more than forty years earlier — when Roxy rises from the bed to rummage in the wardrobe, the early-morning light caressing her bare bottom as Harry just left off doing; the shadowed curves where arse turns into thigh are particular favourites of his. She makes a noise of triumph and pulls his beige cardigan out, slipping it over her tousled head. It covers her from nape to knee, but when she turns the lines of it against her body are far more interesting; between the diagonal slashes of its lapels he can see the flushed-rose skin of the valley between her breasts, the vee ending nearly at her navel. As she steps into the en suite, the garment slips, baring one creamy shoulder to him.

She emerges only a moment later with her make-up kit, though she pauses in the doorway, tilting her head and considering. "This ought to wait until you've showered, unless you think he'll be personally rousting us out of bed?" The knock at the door takes them both aback. She waits for Harry to slip his glasses on before answering, "Yes?"

It's only Eggsy, with a full tray in his hands. The boy's eyes go wide at the incriminating evidence everywhere — Roxy's dishabille, Harry's nudity, the warm scent of the room — but he says nothing, simply setting the tray down on one of the heavy bedside tables. "Didn't know what you'd want, but lots of these tossers are getting tea trays now."

"Very good, Unwin," he says, teasing, but stops short when he sees how Roxy is burrowing into the cardigan and Eggsy is carefully not looking directly at her. He has to shift the atmosphere. "Report, if you please."

"Ain't had time to do much so far, all these pricks been galumphing about, and the servants got to be ready to hop. We're s'posed to have some time once the hunt actually starts, should be able to learn more then." Eggsy is admirably direct as ever, looking Harry in the eye, though he supposes that might be more for the benefit of Merlin, who's watching the feed from Harry's glasses. "How's it going from your side?"

It's a reflex now, to check in with Roxy, and Eggsy doesn't miss the looks they shoot each other. "About the same," Roxy says. "Getting the lay of the land, and now we have to go hunt red grouse with a dozen disgusting old buggers who acted like my arse was a magnet last night."

Eggsy, improbably, is relaxing at Roxy's words, and Harry takes the conversational baton from her. "You'll more than likely have to fight the worst of them off tonight; my father was struck by your charms." He frowns, remembering. "And he did imply that he intends to live long enough to enjoy them for years to come. How, I don't know, as he should have been mouldering in his grave ages ago."

"Fuck, all we need's some demented sod making people immortal," Eggsy says. "First Valentine kills off half the planet and then . . . sorry, Rox."

She's shaking her head. "I called them just after I called your mum. They wouldn't listen to me."

"I know," Eggsy says, gathering her in his arms. That ought to be Harry's job, but Eggsy doesn't coddle her, just gives her a firm squeeze and kisses the top of her head and steps back. "Don't let these bastards make a mockery of your loss." Harry realises, with a pang, that the unabashedly adoring look she's giving Eggsy could have been his, had he only considered her situation a bit more instead of focusing on his prick of a father. Though perhaps not — knowing her as he does, he thinks it likely that she would only accept this rough comfort from her best friend and not her lover.

"Come, Dite," he says, standing and not bothering to dress before pouring her a cup of tea. "Drink up and let's face the day."

"Thank you," she says, crossing the room to accept the cup from his hand.

"Good hunting, Lancelot, Galahad," Eggsy says, formal again, and leaves them to ready themselves for action.

* * *

"Fuck," is all Eggsy says, and Merlin's on full alert, glad that, as ever, Eggsy's following his training and planting audiovisual bugs before doing anything else. He switches his focus from Galahad and Lancelot at the idiotic hunt (it hardly matters that they're surrounded by heavily armed men, as there aren't enough conspirators to make it anything like a fair fight versus two Kingsmen if it comes to that) to Percival, who's cracked the safe in the study like he was born to the trade. "Fuck, these fucking idiots," the lad breathes out, head still bent to read the papers he pulled from the safe.

"Percival," he says softly, testing whether Eggsy's wearing the implant or if he deemed it too conspicuous or troublesome for a servant to wear.

"Tell me I ain't reading this right, guv," Eggsy says, drawing his glasses from the breast pocket of his off-the-peg suit and putting them on, and suddenly Merlin has a very clear view of some highly incriminating paperwork.

The introductory letter is positively masterful, from its greeting (proclaiming Albert Hart to be one of the Chosen) to its signature (RGA Windsor), but it is the middle that appalls him (and Eggsy too, judging by the lad's quick, shocked breaths). This Windsor has evidently done his homework, tracing all the inheritances that were lost after V-Day, and banked on the public's ignorance of what actually happened on that terrible day. The Chosen are assured that the culling that occurred was a means of ridding the world of its weak, and that those who survived have indisputably proved themselves the rightful heirs of the earth. A quirk of the genes, they are told, saved them from the mysterious decapitations, and their own good sense and fitness kept them from falling to the violence that erupted. Those genes, Windsor exhorts, must be preserved now.

Windsor claims to have undertaken a study of some of the Chosen's genes (his own and others who recognised early on the importance of his work) and to have devised a means of sustaining them, for a limited amount of time, outside the body. Each Chosen member may choose to have his (the Chosen, Merlin feels safe in guessing, are all male) genes preserved in perpetuity, kept available in a wiped-clean host to sustain the Chosen and fend off death. All that Windsor needs is a genetic sample and the funds to keep his project afloat, and each Chosen member will have a living (if it can be called living, Merlin thinks, revolted) organ donor whose bounty may be reaped at will.

"Fuck, that's disgusting," Eggsy says, and Merlin is reminded with a sickening jolt how profoundly he loathes Albert Hart. Never mind that this scheme is spurious and designed to part fools from their money; Hart Senior clearly believes it and is willing to invest to preserve his own worthless life. "I'm so sick of these bastard toffs thinkin' they get more shots than everybody else, when they've just been wasting their lives."

"I know," he says, glancing at the monitor that shows Lancelot with a hunting rifle, clearly not needing anyone's help though the offers are plentiful. Galahad is watching her with a besotted look on his face, and either it's meant to bait the trap further or Harry really has lost his head over her. Merlin suspects Roxy would not be quite so at her ease if she believed Harry's heart were as involved in their liaison as his prick, and resolves to offer Harry his shoulder if the whole thing goes to pieces.

"Merlin, how much time have I got?" Eggsy asks, crisp and in command of himself again.

"As much as you need," he assures him. "What are you planning?"

"I need Arthur and Falstaff," Percival says. "Got a bead on this Windsor shithead, Harry'll take care of the rest." He can hear Eggsy swallow before he speaks again. "Did you know? About Rox 'n' him?"

"I did, lad. I saw something meant to stay private when they were in Milan."

Eggsy's silent, but at least he's making good use of the time, using his glasses to photograph each page of the documentation. "Some spy I am. Had no idea, an' I'm meant to be her best friend. Didn't even think she liked him much."

More than ever he wishes he could see his sweetheart's face, but none of the cameras is in quite the right place for that. "Harry's reserved, for all that he's the most dramatic bugger alive, and Roxy seems very much the type to keep her own counsel," he says, as soothingly as he dares. "It's no slight against you." There's only silence as Eggsy continues to work, soundlessly shuffling the papers together into a neat stack to return to the depths of the vault. "You're still the one she relies on for her frogs."

Eggsy laughs, but it's too short for Merlin to hear if it's bitter or sincere. "And now she has her prince."

"Lad —" he says, but then the glasses view switches sharply, as Eggsy's raised his head and turned it to assess how close that noise was. "Go, Percival." Eggsy doesn't need to be told twice, and Merlin watches his beautifully efficient movements, adores the look of concentration on his lovely face, and wonders how on earth he's able to call all of that his and his alone.

He pings Arthur and Falstaff, as requested, and directs them to stand by for Percival's forthcoming message.

*

Hours later, it's not Eggsy's glasses (stowed safely in his pocket, so none of the house's inhabitants see him wearing a pair so strikingly like his supposed master's) that show Merlin at least part of the dénouement, but Harry's. Harry is wearing his, and through them Merlin can see Eggsy's face, jaw set with determination, as he approaches and offers to do up Harry's bowtie. Not that Eggsy has any business doing so (he can just about tie his own, but is useless in mirroring the gestures to tie one on someone else), but it's clearly an excuse to ensure himself a captive audience.

"No, thank you," Harry says, batting away Eggsy's hands. "Have you asked Roxy if she requires any help?" He grins, charming as ever. "You'll be as good a lady's maid as ever you were a valet, I'm sure."

Eggsy's answering grin is a little sharp but it softens as he looks at Harry. "Nah, lemme go ask." But Eggsy's feet stay planted, even as he turns to look over his shoulder (Merlin's gaze is immediately arrested by the taut lines of his throat, the particular curve that will always only mean Eggsy's cheek). "Gotta ask you something first, though. Do you mean it, with Rox?"

Harry's startled, and his voice gets silky, on the cusp of poisonous. "May I ask what business that is of yours?"

Harry's on edge because of this particular mission, and simply being in his childhood bedroom and having to cope with his monster of a father must be doing his head in, but Eggsy is valiant. "She's a top girl, Rox, and she ain't exactly had blokes who were worth much round her until she got to Kingsman. I didn't even know —"

"No," Harry says coolly, "you didn't. Do consider that there might be a reason for that."

There's a hurt flush climbing Eggsy's cheeks, making his eyes look as wet as his mouth. "She said I was to her what you were to me" — Harry stutter-steps, caught out that Eggsy hasn't backed down, and Merlin's hands are in fists even tighter than the knot in his throat — "the first one to talk to her like she was a person, like she was worth something all on her own. I'd say that gives me the right to ask."

Eggsy's eyes are pleading, but the silence between them spins out for an uncomfortably long moment. At last, Harry speaks. "I — I trusted you with Merlin, did I not?" Merlin recognises that tone, that scrambling-for-plausibility tone Harry puts on when he's well and truly cornered.

Eggsy is, as he always is when the chips are down, merciful (Merlin loves him to distraction even as he worries whether that elastic heart will urge clemency toward someone truly dangerous) and says, "Yeah, you did," before turning around and retreating to find Roxy.

With Eggsy gone, Harry turns to his mirror and Merlin sees that the encounter has shaken his façade of lordly ease. He can't recall ever seeing Harry look so fragile, not even when he was in one of his comas, and the ensemble Jeremy crafted for him looks less like a strong knight's armour than a hulking shell around his deflated body. Is confronting his feelings so horrifying to him that he will shrink away and avoid it at all costs? Christ knows Harry cannot bring himself to _say_ that he loves anyone, but even he cannot be so profoundly ignorant of his own unexpressed emotions, can he?

Sooner than expected, Eggsy's back, brushing at Harry's blue velvet smoking jacket (which he _will_ insist on wearing with those plaid trousers though Merlin's told him time and again the outfit makes him look like a pillock). "Lancelot says get your arse in gear, Galahad, and mingle if it kills you. She'll come down when she's ready." Eggsy smiles at Harry's reflection. "Come on then, gotta make me look good and show your old man up." Harry pushes off from the dressing table and heads for the door. Eggsy's words are enough to make him check his step but not stop. "There's a good man."

* * *

God damn Eggsy Unwin for shattering his peace. God damn Merlin, for choosing love with Eggsy over sex and friendship and whisky with him. And God damn Roxanne Elise Morton, Lancelot, eleventh of that honoured name, for so credibly acting the role of his fiancée to spite his father that he himself is taken in, feels his heart race just at the sight of her, wearing his ring. She descends the grand staircase, wrapped in a filmy gown, its metallic bronze hue making her look like a classical statue. The colour tugs at his memory, and when she gets closer, he can see the aquamarine sheen to the layers of fabric that are an exact match for the gemstones on her finger; she's commissioned a [gown based on the _Atlides halesus_](https://www.discoverlife.org/mp/20p?see=I_JWP91&res=640&guide=1), the prize of his collection, which hangs in pride of place in his bedroom. Like that specimen, Roxy stands alone, needing no ornament or dramatic setting for her beauty to strike the viewer dumb and still.

God damn him, for being sentimental and letting an agent fulfilling her brief wring his heart so.

Trust Albert Hart to crash into a moment that is not his. "You exquisite creature," he says, so lascivious that Harry would not be surprised if he licked her hand in lieu of kissing it. "Harry's most prized possession, I'd wager."

The note from Falstaff scrolling by on his lenses informs him that Eggsy's information was enough to locate the accounts John had mentioned earlier; there is no need to play this farce out any longer. His father will die alone — not soon enough for Harry, but relatively soon, as there is no bespoke organ donor under lock and key anywhere ready to grant him unlimited health and life — and Harry has his own life to live: to serve Kingsman, to drink his cellar dry, to grow old with Merlin, to mentor Eggsy, to fuck Roxy.

He takes her hand out of the old man's claw and weaves their fingers together. "I've been wanting to show you this painting, Dite. Humour me?"

She smiles and leans in, enough to press soft breasts against his bicep, and says, "When do I not?"

He leads her by their linked hands, past rooms of grandeur and ornament, to his father's study. The painting is not there. Bewildered, he looks wildly from wall to wall as if his eyes are playing tricks on him.

"Harry?" he hears Roxy say. "Harry?"

He feels like he's been accused of making up his life in this house out of whole cloth. Rationally, he knows that much has changed in the forty years since he last lived here. A boy in primary school cannot have the most reliable memory in any case — perhaps it was here once and now has been relegated to some other room to make way for the far more pornographic canvas that screams for the attention that Aphrodite's sun-drenched flesh easily commanded. It is appallingly typical of his father to advertise freely how low he's sunk.

He turns his back on the splay-legged nude to look at Roxy. "I want to show you my mother's rooms," he says, surprising himself.

"Yes, of course," she says agreeably, and he realises she knows too little about him to appreciate the magnitude of the gesture. Only Merlin — who is probably watching him now, if he didn't cut the feed after watching Harry bully Eggsy — knows anything about his mother. Roxy keeps up with his determined stride, even in her treacherously sharp spiked heels, and her hand in his is a pleasure rather than a necessity.

There is no lingering scent of familiar perfume when he pushes open the door to his mother's suite, but there, above the mantelpiece, is Aphrodite, far less beautiful than his Dite — though to be fair, the painting clashes terribly with the wallpaper, spoiling both of them; his father lacks even the rudiments of taste. He takes Roxanne's warm face in his hands and kisses her. Roxy kisses back, but she must have kept her eyes open, for she breaks away with a little laugh. "I look nothing like that!" she says.

"Like a boy's own dream? I must insist, Dite, that you do. Wrapped in this _Atlides halesus_ gown, inciting that monster downstairs to the bitterest envy, a Kingsman to the core, you are every inch the best dream of my life."

Her level look makes the stream of his words dry up. "A dream can't follow you into the waking world, Harry." She takes his hand, and now she's the one ready to retrace their steps and lead him back. "Come. It's time we put in an appearance."

She's not wearing her glasses; she has no way of knowing that HQ considers this mission closed, however much leeway Merlin is willing to give him with respect to his sire's mortality. "Our task is done, Dite, and there's nothing to go back for. In any case, I'd rather keep you out of my father's reach."

It's sincere but a bit of a joke as well, only Roxy frowns, drops his hand, and takes a step away from him. "Surely you know better than to assume that I'd have any trouble with him? I bested you, did I not?"

"Pax, Dite," he says, reeling her in, but she will not come into his arms. "What on earth is the matter?" The wallpaper is a clear spring green, unfaded from his memories; the servants have been earning their keep in this room at least, drawing the curtains to keep the hues his mother chose safe from the sun. He remembers hours in these rooms, safe at his mother's knee, and how her hand would sweep tenderly over his hair, the best feeling in the world.

"I'm not sure you haven't got hold of the wrong idea," Roxanne says carefully, so still that the colours of her gown stay fixed instead of shimmering with her every breath. "The field is clear for you to go after your father openly, without any diversions or excuses." He nods; he knows that better than she does, as he's the one with Falstaff's directive on his lenses. "You don't need to put me in the middle and fight for my honour. I am not your fiancée."

Is _everyone_ intent on abandoning him? At least his voice doesn't shake when he says, "You could do worse." The obvious retort hangs between them, though she has the grace not to name the _someone better_ she has in mind. Thinking back to her behaviour at various moments, he realises: it's Eggsy. "He's not for you," he says, more gently, and _there_, mortifyingly, is the quiver in his voice — sorrow for her losing her heart to her best friend, and for him for having done the same and not understood, thirty years ago. "Stay with me. Stay, Dite."

She looks up at him then, watchful eyes fixed on his face. He lets his hunger for her show, but all she does is nod slightly and say, "They'll be sending a search party after us."

"Wait," he says, and pulls her close for a kiss, his fingers weaving through the fragrant warmth of her hair. "Best to be safe," he says, satisfied that she looks tousled enough to have just been taking advantage of the relative privacy of her fiancé's childhood home. He has no doubt he looks convincingly dazed with lust; now, when she's at last built a wall between them, he wants her more than ever.

*

"Shall I commend you for your unexpected generosity with your father?" Merlin asks, breaking in on his thoughts in a most unwelcome fashion. He should never have got used to wearing the glasses again.

"Cease poking around in my brain and go bother Eggsy," he says, short and sharp.

"I've got my lad with me," Merlin says, as if they're in complete agreement. "We're flat-hunting."

At least Harry has grown enough to _want_ to be happy for them. "Then why are you pestering me when he should have your full attention?"

"I am capable of multitasking, you tit," Merlin says mildly. Too mildly — Harry now knows for sure that the nosy bugger heard his plea to Roxy to stay, to warm his bed and wear his ring. "Even if _your_ sense of drama demands that you go full Heathcliff and pretend that there's only one thought in that big head of yours." Harry would snarl, but he's loath to prove the smug bastard right. "If there's any room in there for a second thought, let it be that you can talk to me about anything, at any time." Merlin's voice is obscenely comforting, low and intimate, and Harry lets the warmth of it wash over him.

Too soon, he hears the volume of Eggsy's chattering abruptly increase, and surmises that Merlin's being summoned, possibly tugged along by the hand. It will be a cold day in hell before he's not wildly jealous of Eggsy Unwin, on more than one count. "Go," he manages to say and disconnects the call before he hears any more.

*

He hasn't seen her in what feels like an eternity — and his body, unused to this sexual deprivation, is making every night a sleepless one — but the Bedivere trials are beginning and Merlin's given his team free rein to not only conduct the trials but also to enlist knights as they see fit. He's expecting to be called in for some of the combat drills, but he's left alone until the train test, when he — not Roxy, as he'd expected — is the target the trainees are supposed to seduce. He finds all of these callow candidates profoundly uninteresting, though the set-up is at least a little amusing: he's lecturing them on neuro-linguistic programming whilst they are exerting themselves to employ all the techniques he's outlining and win him over.

Not one of them has her spark. At least Merlin's team haven't reconceived the tests so entirely that he'd have to let one of the candidates touch him. He is grimly satisfied to see them tied to the train tracks, and even more so when he understands that his acting as bait means not one of them will ever get to touch Roxy.

Or so he thinks until he's invited to watch the parachute test, which no longer serves as the weeding-out stage but rather as the fine-tuning after loyalty has been demonstrated. Roxy, for some reason, is in the plane with the candidates — Roxy, who'd had such difficulties during her own parachute test, as he'd seen in reviewing the Lancelot trials months ago. The surge of pride he feels from watching her issue commands as if she's never even heard of a fear of heights takes him entirely by surprise. Beatrice — who's running the room from Merlin's own chair — nods her appreciation for Lancelot's leadership.

"Land in the K or you're out of the K," Roxy says, cool as can be, and Harry cannot help reacting to the authority in her voice. It comes out even more strongly when one of the candidates tries to challenge her into revealing the twist to the test. "Orders may change moment to moment, and you'll need to react in real time. All you need to know now is that your task is to land safely in the K."

Not even Merlin could sound so masterful, Harry thinks, and wonders where the man is, why he's allowing others to recite his speeches and take his seat behind the wall of monitors.

* * *

Eggsy is doing nothing purposeful to distract him, but flying is not so difficult that it requires more than a fraction of his mind, and in any case the lad's very presence is enough to heighten all of his senses. The thought of making a home with Eggsy (even if it's not any of the thousand and one flats they've seen already; Eggsy is clearly some sort of time-bending imp on his days off) is mind-bogglingly joyous, and apparently not only to him, if the lad's smiles are anything to judge by.

They're both wearing headsets, so he knows Eggsy hears as well as he does Roxy's lecture to the candidates steeling themselves to jump out of the plane he's holding steady. The approving smile Eggsy wears curls his lips just so, and Merlin knows that whatever happens with Harry, Roxy hasn't forfeited Eggsy's respect and friendship. There are multitudes, entire universes, in the lad.

He remembers watching the Lancelot candidates clustered on the plane, how sweetly Eggsy had cheered on Roxy, his most fearsome competitor, and how well she had responded to his rough care. He remembers how it had felt a little like his insides were rushing after Eggsy as the lad nonchalantly tipped backwards out of the plane to set her an example; he wonders now if her heart had plummeted too, tied like an anchor to Eggsy's bright face.

"Bea and Rox are killin' it," Eggsy says, one hand covering his microphone. Bea is offering up the test's hypothetical, that one of the Bedivere candidates might not have a functional parachute, her steady tone not betraying in the slightest that this is her first time putting candidates through their paces directly.

_Yes_, Merlin nearly says out loud, several minutes later (after two more candidates have been eliminated and the successful ones have been dispatched to the dormitory), when Roxy dives out of the plane, no hesitation in her smooth movements. She's come a long way. "Lancelot keeps getting more and more impressive," he says, partly to answer Eggsy and partly because he's certain Bea and Arthur will be reviewing each day of the trial together, and Roxanne's willingness to tackle her fear in a non-mission situation (with all the anticipation and anxiety that involves) is commendable and should be noted for the record.

"Attagirl, Rox," Eggsy says with a fist-pump. "Hope she's feelin' the good adrenaline this time."

*

Merlin has Eggsy tucked up against him, snuffling softly into his neck (the lad had better not be getting sick, not when they've promised to visit Cambridge and Merlin's got Daisy's duck-shaped kite sky-worthy) when his tablet starts transmitting an agent's feed. It takes him a moment (a warm Eggsy is very restful, and he was so close to drifting off to sleep) to identify it as Harry's and a moment more to work out that Harry's forgotten that he now has the option to wear the glasses without activating the camera, that they can be pure camouflage for his eye.

Well, Harry's never been quite as good with non-weaponised technology as he pretends, and Merlin's always been a little nosier than the average man, and he can see, through the lenses, that it's Roxy who's knocked on Harry's door. She looks properly turned out even though it's past midnight, and her presence is clearly a surprise because it takes Harry a long moment to scrape together a greeting.

For all her butter-wouldn't-melt appearance, she still knows her mind. "I want to fuck," she says simply.

He can hear how sharp Harry's indrawn breath is, even if he can't see the man's face. "Brava," Harry says, and that must be a code of some kind, because Roxy relaxes and steps inside, confident of her right of entry. "What makes you think I choose —"

"This," she interrupts, holding up her hand, and Merlin sees the ring on her finger (_Harry's_ ring, not Galahad's) sparkling. "It's mine. For as long as I choose to wear it."

"Yes, Dite," Harry says. "It's yours."

Merlin clicks off the tablet, sets it on the bedside table, and folds himself down into the nest of warmth Eggsy has made of the cocooning sheets. Eggsy hums happily in his sleep, and Merlin smiles and turns out the lights.


End file.
